My work begins where language gives way—at the edges of intuition, spiritual searching, and the need for shelter in a world that often fails to offer it. I build large-scale paintings and installations that act as portals or shields, using paint, wood, glass, and gathered fragments to hold ritual, memory, and unease in careful balance.

I circle fragile places where protection and harm blur. Wood appears as something learned through necessity: habits of self-protection I built by hand, shaped slowly, grain by grain, in response to instability. Glass carries what I did not choose—old memories, inherited tendencies, and family patterns that linger even when they fracture. It shimmers with promise, but remains brittle. When these materials meet, they press against one another: endurance alongside fragility, agency against inheritance, repair against what continues to strain.

Throughout the work, gestures of safety fold back on themselves. Amulets carry weight yet crack; glass chains gleam but cannot hold; solitude offers shelter, though it can just as easily harden into isolation. These forms operate as thresholds—spaces where clarity falters, and strength shows its fault lines, echoing the contradictions of care, fear, and survival passed quietly through family lines.

My process is slow and porous, shaped less by plan than by what accumulates—testimony in bark, remembered images, altered states of mind. I follow what feels charged, allowing materials and symbols to assemble intuitively into structures that hover between refuge and strain, holding both protection and what continues to press from within.

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madison Boeder