Maddie McNeely

Understory
10.30–12.13.2025
Room 1

The forest is both a reserved and exploited territory. It provides shelter and resources while bearing the traces of extraction and loss. Our built environments reproduce the same tensions: they offer rest, but are shaped by a logic of ownership, profit, and control. How can we evolve in a system where protection itself can harm and increase our vulnerability?

By observing our homes, we can notice the link between our dwellings and the forest. Behind our walls, hidden trees turned into beams – separating the interior from the exterior – create a structure that is both secure and constraining. Maddie McNeely brings these contradictions between architectural and natural environments into dialogue in her column sculptures, tracing lines in the wood that are equally straight and organic.

The evocation of shelter is further summoned by the brick motif. The artist has crafted over a hundred briquettes from the debris of her sculptures and found materials. Each fragment collected participates in a cycle of continuous circulation and transformation, where resources are renewed and generate abundance. These bricks then become time capsules: they preserve traces of her life shared with her family and friends playing, sculpting, eating, exchanging – simple acts of survival and support. Assembled, these memories archived in the material lay the foundations for a comforting nest.

The construction of an embodied refuge requires careful and slow crafting, rhythmed by the tireless repetition of the same gestures. Physical exhaustion opens up a meditative state, a soothing fatigue. Within this constancy, every action becomes presence, every contact with the material reveals its history, and a reciprocal relationship is born. Repetition thus transforms work into exploration, leading to tactile knowledge – handiwork that nourishes the mind, recalling the value of craftsmanship and responsibility for what one creates.

From this intimacy with wood emerges mimesis. The artist conjures up several familiar shapes: nut, axle, lipstick, pencils, matches, emergency ladder. Some faithful to their proportions, others exaggerated or reduced, these replicas destabilize our bearings and sway our sense of reality. Inspired by her children, who learn by imitating, McNeely reveals our ability to reproduce, but also warp the world around us. In a universe skewered by ecogrief, her sculptures become attempts at making connections and inventing anchor points in the midst of instability.

This quest for balance is inspired by a layer of the forest: the understory. There, young trees waiting for an opening in the canopy coexist with mature shrubs in the shade. In Understory, McNeely explores how to take root in interstitial zones to create a nurturing and resilient space, despite threats. Like the egg that punctuates the space, a symbol of inception, the promise of life inevitably summons strength and vulnerability; in this delicate encounter, renewal is born, irresistible and necessary.

— Camille Richard