BIO//CV
Madi Stephens is an artist based in Seattle, Washington. Her art practice is interdisciplinary, using mixed-media sculptural painting, installation, and writing to explore the relationship between impermanence and identity, examining how we form and transform ourselves through the cycles of creation and destruction. Their work is informed by their BA in Studio Art, Art History + Visual Studies. They have exhibited in multiple galleries across Seattle and is currently an MFA candidate at Seattle University in Arts Leadership.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Each breathing moment binds together to create the self. Closeness is housed within the body—a physical manifestation of circumstance, love, and loss. Memory lingers beneath the skin, and my body speaks in fragments.
My practice is rooted in the act of making paper, a process of both destruction and preservation. Prints, love poems, and forgotten to-do lists are torn, pulped, and reformed into something new. Found ephemera—discarded notes, tattered posters, remnants of the every day—become embedded within the fibers. This accumulation of material mirrors the way relationships shape us: layered, weathered, sometimes hidden, but never fully erased.
Like the body, spaces, too, absorb memory. They hold stories. My work, often rigid and textured, invites touch—an almost defiant call for connection. If this art is a reflection of myself, then each piece extends an invitation: to know, to feel, to share an instance of intimacy. This is an act of taking care.
The skin is thick, but the heart remains soft. I seek to honor the weight of what we carry, the traces we leave behind, and the quiet spaces in between.
Press
