Maddie Edwards

BFA Drawing

ARTIST STATEMENT: My exhibit showcases a collection of illustrations that show my process for creating the visual concept for a story. The story follows a young prince dawned the opposite end of a silver spoon as the child is forced from their castle and sent on a journey. Along the way, he meets fantastical creatures and makes unlikely friends. The two that follow him on his journey are the island fox and the fairy. The prince, being a young child with an overactive imagination, is an unreliable narrator and the fantastical elements in the story are a manifestation of the prince working through his own emotional needs. As he takes a step towards the entrance to the city filled with clouds, his friends slowly fade away and are gone once he crosses over into the city. The viewer cannot know what truly is happening to the boy. Did he pass away in the kingdom and now he journeys in the spirit realm? Were the friends he met real at all? Where did they go? This is meant to be open-ended within the booklet itself so the viewer may come up with their own conclusions informed by their own experience. For me, it represents the very friends that I consider found family also being friends that I have grown apart from as I’ve gotten older. The type of friendship where it is too awkward to say goodbye but too pointless to say hello, as we are different than who we were when we were younger. Yet, those friends helped me become who I am today, and their memory continues to help me hold onto hope for the future. The theme is a pursuit of happiness in the face of an unhappy home life and the discovery of one’s found family and new home.

My creative work includes an array of things such as digital illustration, animation, and game development. Everything I make is sketched and rendered digitally within the program Clip Studio Paint. In the past, I would do all my sketching on paper, but I found I preferred to do it digitally as a means of reducing all the paper waste and space it took up. It is hard to pinpoint what exactly my work is aside from my interest in sparkles and bright colors. I believe what holds my work together is this pursuit of happiness and finding a way to comfort those that have had the same experiences. I have been through a lot of sadness and hardships in my life already and its beautiful to know that I will never be alone in my sadness because someone else out in the world can understand that feeling. My work aims to bridge that gap, to offer stories that can bring comfort to them and to my younger self. That young version of me who experienced it all and decided to keep going for the sake of becoming who I am today.

Maddie Edwards, Found, digital artwork printed in 11 x 8.5” booklet