Madge Evers :: Kathryn Petruccelli

I encountered Madge Evers and her spore print art at a neighborhood festival a few years back. Looking at her ghostly, exuberant work stole my breath, and I knew I couldn't take it in the way I wanted to while standing under a makeshift tent at a folding table in the last minutes of a one-day event while my kids begged for popsicles. I pocketed her card and not long after she invited me to visit her home studio. 

I fell deeply in love with her process of using living mushrooms and other plants to build stunning impressions and herbariums on paper. I'm excited that since that time I've gotten to know Madge better and watched her work branch into cyanotypes and pieces that play off of, or "compost" as she puts it, other works. (Reimagining Audubon's birds, anyone?)
 
Madge is an artist in conversation with the earth. She is both someone with keen vision and a brave channeler for what might happen that is out of her control. These qualities are perfect guidelines for art and poetry and life. Her work offers me true awe and wonder, joy, complexity and inspiration. It sings the unsung. I can't think of what else I could ask for.

                                                                   ~Kathryn Petruccelli 

Art: Studying Dandelion, mushroom spores on cyanotype by Madge Evers