Madge Evers is a mixed-media artist whose practice is rooted in sustained attention to plant life and its slower, less visible processes. Working with alternative photographic techniques, mushroom spores, and painting, she engages both observed landscape details and imagined botanical forms. Her work has been exhibited throughout New England, and she has participated in residencies in Massachusetts, Virginia, Ireland, and New York. She is the author of Printing With the Sun, a book about the cyanotype process, published by Storey. Evers lives and works in western Massachusetts
About
Plants transcend time and place. Upon first seeing Emily Dickinson's Herbarium, a collection of preserved plant specimens she gathered in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts where I live and work, I recognized the flora around me as iterations of the very plants Dickinson collected, pressed, and archived for future generations. Despite my curiosity and uneasy desires, I cannot travel to the past or far into distant futures. In my longing to connect with both realms, to touch what remains unknowable of times gone and times to come, I collect and preserve plants. I use flora as a bridge, a blurred boundary, a borderline between past and future. With flowers, leaves, and stems—combined with cyanotype’s shifting blues, paint, and mushroom spores—I create works on paper that register distance and desire. The work echoes Rebecca Solnit’s ideas in The Blue of Distance about tracing melancholy and longing as ways of moving through the complex terrain of memory. My mushroom spore prints and blueprints hold that tension—between presence and absence, preservation and disappearance.I’m interested transformation.