Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist working across printmaking and photography. For more than twenty years, my practice has developed through digital and hand-pulled printmaking processes, layered with photographic imagery I have taken over time. This process allows me to blur the line between memory, imagination, and reality.
At the center of my work is a recurring set of universal symbols paired with personal imagery: houses, landscapes, the human figure, and horizon lines. A house can suggest shelter, belonging, instability, or loss; a landscape can evoke both permanence and change. I build images in layers because no single photograph or printed element feels complete on its own. The layering reflects the way memory and place accumulate, overlap, and shift over time.
Underlying much of my work is an interest in fragility—personal, political, environmental—and in our uncertain relationship with the natural world and the structures, physical and social, that we build within it. At times this has taken a more direct form, as in my Gender, Dating, and Politics series, where quotations from political speeches and media, layered over images of clothing, trace how public language enters intimate spaces and how easily the personal becomes political.
In July 2026, a two-week residency with The Arctic Circle took me sailing through the waters around Svalbard, where I photographed glaciers, ice, exposed rock, abandoned structures, and the shifting twenty-four-hour light. Being immersed in a landscape visibly changing by the hour made questions of impermanence and precariousness immediate rather than abstract. The Arctic work extends my longstanding interest in human ecology and joins the houses, landscapes, and other images that have shaped my practice over time.
I am drawn to the space between abstraction and lived reality—images recognizable enough to suggest a place, object, or experience, but open enough to hold multiple meanings. Through layering, I bring together the personal and the collective, the intimate and the global, and the familiar with the unsettled. My work asks how we make sense of a world that is constantly changing, and invites us to look closely at what is shifting around us and to ask what we want to hold onto.
Bio
Madeleine Soloway is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography and printmaking. She combines her photographs with digital and hand-pulled prints to create layered works that explore fragility across personal, political and environmental terrain. Drawn to the space between abstraction and lived reality, her work returns to recurring motifs: landscapes, houses, and the figure, to consider memory, place, impermanence, and change. Originally from Boston, she has been an exhibiting artist in the Atlanta area for 35 years and taught on the art faculty at The Paideia School for 25 years. She holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Marietta Cobb Art Museum, Atlanta Photography Group Gallery, Swan Coach House, Terminus Gallery, and Ponce City Market during Atlanta Celebrates Photography, alongside earlier solo exhibitions at Jeremy Stone Gallery, San Francisco. In July 2026, she completed a residency with the Arctic Circle Residency Program, sailing the waters of Svalbard, an experience now shaping a new body of work centered on ecological fragility.