Madeleine Collopy - Nate Finch - Mixed media painting - Friday 31 October - Saturday 22 November 2025

Taking Shape

In this new body of work, I wanted to explore the transitions between darkness and light – both as visual states and as metaphors for shifting inner worlds. Working with a deliberately restrained palette of deep blues, greens, and warm browns, I wanted to limit my choices and focus on the subtleties within them. The resulting paintings trace a gradual passage from shadow into illumination, mirroring the way fleeting thoughts, memories, and sensations can surface from obscurity into clarity.

This series is as much about the process and physicality of painting as it is about the finished image. I have been experimenting with different surfaces – raw and primed canvas – and with the contrasting behaviours of oil and acrylic paint, allowing the materiality of each to guide the direction of the work. Through these shifts, I am interested in how paint can hold and transmit sensory experience, how visual energy can be provoked, and how transient internal states might be transformed into something concrete, like painting.

These paintings are a sort of reflection on time; and when you get deep into the painting state where you’re no longer thinking about anything else in the outside world, often imagery emerges from the washes of the paint where it feels like there is a sort of magic to the medium. It is as if it comes from the hidden subconscious parts of your brain that you can’t usually access. These fleeting thoughts that are now on the canvas start to take shape.  Madeleine Collopy, artist 2025.

Recent Works

My work explores relationships that develop between mark intensities, colour harmonies and surface textures. Things that can’t be explained in words, or responses to living, are translated into my own unique visual language. It serves as an interpretation of the gritty complexities of the human condition encountered day to day in this increasingly ever-connected world. This language provides a portal into my subconscious, and in turn, offers the viewer an opportunity to access theirs. I leave interpretation open, inviting the viewer to add something of themselves to the viewing experience to try to initiate a conversation between myself, the surface and the viewer. I allow the work to inform itself, using energy that is spontaneous and direct, placing emphasis on materiality. Scale, space and the movement of the artist become mediums of their own, equally as important in the communication.  Nate Finch, artist 2020