Artist Statement

Through video, performance and sculpture, Madison Bycroft explores an animist way of being in the world, rethinking what it means to be a ‘person’ and how we understand, relate and speak to the world. Her video and performance works often present as short experiments in unlearning the self or normal modes of being, the practice of empathy and processes of becoming other. Her sculptural practice explores the world of things, objects, or “it’s”, how they resonate with us and how they might become animated. Bycroft often works with forms that are strange and unrecognizable, and that don’t sit quietly in any box. In lieu of categorical and colonizing thought, Bycroft is interested in relational understanding, something which requires com-passion: in Latin, a feeling with that extends to difference—to the animal and other people—creating a sense of communion with the world.