Madeleine Palmer

20 August – 11 September, 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 20 August, 5-7pm

I’m drawn to the symbols I organise and re-organise again. These abstracted arrangements of true language signify a beginning in an end. Illuminated texts, manuscripts, obtained by religion, were scarce in the age of their existence. Knowledge was wielded as a weapon, authorising power and status copied by blind hands. This depravity resides in the present moment. Except now in its excess, we struggle to obtain it, forced into wading through piles of waste that dilutes our thoughts and opinions into uselessness. It is an addiction, a rot.

This absence of thought through capitalising the uninformed, alongside the preservation of knowledge is ongoing and repeatedly inflicted on contemporary political landscapes. Lives are absorbed physically and spiritually by the indoctrination of belief and absolution in ‘fact’. In this obscene excess there is a lack there-of.

Tethered between abundance and scarcity, my prose reaches beyond its painted typographical structures. Suspended within apocalyptic manifestations - an architectural wasteland of petroleum and welded steel.

There is knowledge and truth in my words, if people are willing to wade through the waste to get to it. Above the clergy and beneath the transmission towers, through the gaps of construction fence, between the cracks of the cathedral triforium...

What truly exists there may appear intimidating of prophesying. But it is truth, it is real. It is not waste. 

Madeleine Palmer is in her third year studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at the VCA, University of Melbourne. Her practice, in transforming the Medieval and iconography of the past, investigates ethical concerns surrounding capitalising the uninformed, agendas of knowledge and organised religion within techno-feudal landscapes. Her work has been exhibited with VCA Artspace and Oddany Gallery. In 2025, Madeleine was awarded the Lionel Gell Scholarship alongside the Young Artists Commission for the Queen’s College Collection and is a finalist for the Majlis Fellowship Exhibition 2026 at the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery.