What can water do when a feeling is too big for our body? Madeline Richards’ The World Made Strange
Madeline Richards, Untitled 2 (on grief), 2022, oil on canvas, 52 x 56in. Photo credit: Richard-Max Tremblay.
One could almost feel the water licking their skin as they wander through the paintings in The World Made Strange – a sun-soaked exhibition that was part of Richards’ and her cohort’s MFA thesis show at The Ottawa Art Gallery entitled Le rendu: Art from The University of Ottawa Department of Visual Arts (March 4, 2023 - June 11, 2023). The World Made Strange lived in the Stonecroft Foundation Project Gallery, where deep teal walls engulfed anonymous bodies, and large windows allowed one to come up for air. In this article, I reflect on Richards’ use of water as a metaphor for grief: from trauma to healing.
Madeline Richards, installation view, “Le rendu: Art from the University of Ottawa Department of Visual Arts, 2022,” 2023, Ottawa Art Gallery. Photo credit: Anthony Léger.
Although I have known Richards for two years now, visited her studio at the University of Ottawa throughout the final year of her MFA (during which she produced this emotional series), and spoken to her at length during the preparation of this article, there is a tacit agreement not to ask her about her story. Instead, Richards lets her paintings convey, through empathy, the information required to feel what she may have gone through and how painting may have helped her recover. Strategically withholding and supremely generous, Richards makes her grief deeply felt without illustrating her trauma.
A recurring element in The World Made Strange is water, and the way it interacts with the vulnerable body. Both life-giving and life-threatening, Richards’ depiction of water calls upon our core memories of the substance: being pushed into a pool by a parent before we felt ready; taking baths with other babies whose names we no longer remember; being drowned – “playfully” – by a sibling; skinny-dipping for the first time… fear, pleasure, and freedom converge in these bright and mysterious paintings. As her figures fluctuate between drowning and seeking out water’s touch, Richards explores water’s paradoxical relationship to the human body. I propose that in doing so, Richards makes water a symbol of healing.
Madeline Richards, Butterfly 1 (on grief), 2022, oil on canvas, 44 x 57in. Photo credit: Richard-Max Tremblay.
The theorist who has guided much of Richards’ work, art historian Jill Bennett, and, in particular, her 2005 text Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, postulates the experience of empathic vision when viewing art: “the affective operations of art” [3] create “a way of seeing and feeling”[4] for both artist and viewer by which “the affective responses engendered by artworks are not born of emotional identification or sympathy; they emerge from a direct engagement with sensation as it is registered in the work”[6]. If we apply the theory of emphatic vision to Richards’ loose brushwork and translucent layers of paint, the affective response produced is one of nostalgia, discomfort, and curiosity. The child-like imagery triggered by neon noodles and blurred water evokes an intentionally hazy memory of what might have been. We find ourselves immersed in soft and chaotic inner landscapes; as if the body, filled with water, is inhabited by a solitary, wandering figure, knocking it off balance with every step. Imagine Pinocchio, swallowed by the whale, treading through heavy currents to find his way out.
Madeline Richards, Butterfly 2 (on grief), 2022, oil on canvas, 58 x 76in. Photo credit: Richard-Max Tremblay.
Despite the colourful palette employed by Richards, the more one scrutinizes the ambiguous bodies depicted in each scene, the stranger they become. In Untitled (on grief), loose, disjointed, spidery limbs straddle the boundary between struggle and surrender. In the Butterfly I (on grief) and Butterfly II (on grief), nude bodies wade peacefully towards the abyss, their destination unknown. With no horizon line in sight, and dark shadows that could be mountains reflected just as well as they could be seaweed or a sea monster, Richards’ all-over approach to painting water creates an unsettling landscape. As this strangeness settles in, the reliability of the memories shown in these works is called into question. It becomes clear the story conveyed is not an accurate event, but an emotional kaleidoscope.
This strangeness is partly in reference to Bennett’s concept of the mnemic object: as a memory is reworked by the worried brain, its blurs and reveals a “world made strange by death … an alienating and disorienting experience of loss,” [7] – a loss that may reference the repeated experience of grief through remembrance, or the grieving of memories fading against our will. Richards writes, “the bodies and objects in my paintings come from remembering. They transform as I paint, becoming less what they were, and more what they are to me now. Through remaking the mnemic object in paint, it is in a perpetual state of transformation and ‘becoming strange’” [8]. The vagueness of Richards’ works – blurry, meandering, disjointed bodies in mucky waters painted in layered and fluid transparencies – evoke a dreamlike rendering of the complex and fluid grieving process.
Madeline Richards, Untitled (dark), 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 18in. Photo credit: Richard-Max Tremblay.
Struggle set aside, Richards’ figures are eerily confident and bright. “I like to paint with ironic colours,” she explains. In Butterfly II (on grief) and Untitled (on grief), neon blown-glass-like balloons float like dead fish on a lake. In Butterfly I (on grief), Butterfly II (on grief), and Untitled (on grief) 2, bubblegum-coloured butterfly wings carry the bodies, like halos made of pool noodles. Richards describes these as “external lungs” – making space for more breath than the body can hold. Expansive and fluid, Richards’ bodies of water absorb grief and lick its wounds, thus relieving minds from holding those difficult emotions, even momentarily. Richards even questions whether the space she depicts can absolutely be understood as water: ambiguous, multi-coloured and impossible to grasp, maybe it is a symbol, a slippery space unbound by the body, a leaky limbo for memory and imagination.
Madeline Richards, Untitled (on grief), 2022, oil on canvas, 53 x 65.5in. Photo credit: Richard-Max Tremblay.
The water in The World Made Strange, buoyant and all-consuming, for me provokes the affective experience of trust and care. Were I to swim in it, I could picture its gentle waves holding me and keeping me moving. As cheesy as it sounds, I find myself wondering whether water holds enough of our pain for our hearts to float. Richards’ water reflects an image of grief as soft, brimming with empathy and surrender. The jagged edge of the memory has been softened by water, like sea glass tossed in and out of tides over time.
[1] Madeline Richards, “The World Made Strange.” 8 Jan. 2023. Artist statement.
[2] Madeline Richards, “Thinking Through the Body: A study on memory, affect, and grief in painting.” Apr.13, 2022. 1. The Work of Art in Context, University of Ottawa, student paper.
[3] Jill Bennett, “Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art.” Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 3.Stanford University Press, 2005
[4] Bennett, “Empathic Vision,” 21.
[5] Bennett, “Empathic Vision,” 10.
[6] Bennett, “Empathic Vision,” 7.
[7] Bennett, “Empathic Vision,” 67.
[8] Richards, “The World Made Strange.”