Exhibition with Claudia Lemke at Bus Projects, Melbourne, 2018

Attention is the minimum of maintaining life, a gift of presence, of colour. Green seeks little attention, a thin-blooded background, efficient, infrastructural. A surface for distributing energy. Unless maintenance breaks, and new life bursts, threatens: slime, contagion, aliens fluoresce green. This is green's expression: a contradictory movement between health and terror, the authentically young and the fictionally sick, drawing attention to the artificiality of those categories, so that they might burst as well, doubly green.

'Flowery' is an accusation of inefficiency, of something too handled or unclean, something decomposing. 'Cliché' is an accusation of efficiency, to its excess, something both flashy and common. Accusations announce the limit between the welcome and unwelcome, and are not usually directed at flowers or clichés, which otherwise unassumingly exist as soft compulsions. They furnish the rooms, narratives and grids of power, working together at either end of efficiency. Until accused, then they pass from welcome to unwelcome, from sacrament to ornament. This is the bind of painting, of images, their plague.

Holes, reduced to their cliché, script the possibility of entrance and exit. The body takes the hole beyond the cliché, furnishes it with particulars: tubes, sockets, cavities. What if one were to hear the ears tear themselves from the logic of the hole? To become winged like a pore, an irresistible medium of the air? Religion scripts the possibility of non-violence, where violence becomes 'purposeful', becomes suffering, becomes the logic of the body. Doubt plagues any hole, any violent act, requiring faith. What would it mean for an ear to become unfaithful? What sound would the body then make, as a bruised spray, falling through heaven?

- Aodhan Madden