Working with linoleum to create prints of earthy or whimsical imagery, Madison Barnett, aka Coyote Love Poems, is a community taught printmaker and multimedia artist based in the Rocky Mountains of the United States. Her work features fine details and fun colours which are printed by hand on paper as well as fabric bandanas, altar cloths, and used clothing.
With a degree in Forest Management, Madison works as a forester doing reforestation and other land management projects in the Rocky Mountains. Her day-to-day involves a heavy amount of fieldwork, so she finds herself spending a lot of time deep in the woods. Madison learned relief printing as a kid, through carving small stamps out of erasers, and she has no formal printmaking education beyond a printmaking class in high school. She tells us; “I didn’t come back to the medium until I worked as a fire lookout in a remote part of Montana after I graduated college. Since then, I’ve gradually expanded my skills largely through independent experimentation.”
“I am interested in how art continually enriches our lives, and allows us to bring our expression of inner selves and symbols to the visual tangible realm,” says the printmaker. Many of the images Madison chooses to create are based on personal synchronicities and symbolic imagery; “I like to allow symbols or themes to let themselves be known, and as they do so, they continually reoccur. I consider this synchronicity to be magic and a trick of the mind and creative entities. I use these techniques to explore deep inner symbolic worlds as they present themselves, or use the meditation of carving and printing intentional images by hand to facilitate spellwork.”
For example, Madison has created a handful of prints using images of coyotes, inspired by meaningful coyote encounters over a period of years. In North America, the coyote symbolises a trickster figure and something on the edge of human society. She states; “Working with the figure of Coyote has helped me to explore my own relationship with land and introversion, assessing feelings of not belonging and the perception of moving along the edges of human society. Coyote is so familiar, being canine and therefore having a deep relationship with humanity, but it is still other. I am fascinated by this opportunistic scavenger, and how they interact with human spaces as their habitat becomes encroached on. They are something all at once hated, beloved, and mythic.” Coyote Love Poems, which is the name of her shop and the name she uses on social media, is inspired by thinking about the trickster that is love in a period of deep solitude in a wide open prairie, working as a fire lookout. ‘Coyote’ is the trickster and the ecosystem she moved within, and ‘Love Poems’ symbolises a feeling of longing, love with nowhere to send it.
Madison’s prints are inspired by symbolic imagery, looking at themes such as ecosystem connection or lack of connection, archaeology, taxonomic loneliness and the feeling of missing and romanticizing early human ancestors. She is further inspired by folk art of her own ancestry and exploring ancestor veneration and symbolic magic through printmaking, bringing spiritual and artistic practices together.
“Printmaking is a big love, but I’m forever inspired by exploration of mediums and following creative whims,” says the artist. Madison hopes to move into creating intentional pieces of clothing printed with imagery evoking themes such as mythological figures, the folkloric, and elemental colour combinations that evoke place. She comments; “Printing on fabric allows me to bring relief printing into the realm of body adornment, as wearable art and an offering to self. Our relationships to ourselves and the world around us are shaped by how we appear, and clothing and adornment allows us to project how we feel on the inside outward, so others may see us how we wish to be seen. I see this as magic at its mundane finest, and I would love to use printing on fabric and other forms of adornment to further explore this.”
Recently, she has been delving into metalsmithing as well as perfumery, and would love to tie those mediums together as part of a block printed clothing and adornment line, creating a magic wearable archetype enveloping multiple senses of the wearer. Madison has been experimenting with kinetic brass pendants using opals she cut and shaped herself, and hopes to release pendants like this with flowy white linen pieces printed with imagery in rainbow gradients, mirroring the play of colours in precious opal, alongside scents notes of salt and soft florals.
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