Misreading Misreading
Tia Madden
November 2025
Misreading Misreading is an exhibition about the curious, alchemical power of the reader. Before it came to mean ‘one who apprehends the meaning of the written,’ the word reader referred to a diviner of riddles: someone who intuits by guesswork, as one might interpret a dream. But if we misread the meaningless as meaningful, we might incidentally allow fictions to come to life— or indeed, become truths.
The exhibition combines the material logic of a nineteenth-century printing press with the unruly, inarticulate, inscrutable scrawl of graffiti— what Jean Baudrillard once described as “a kind of angular, syncopated writing that no longer says anything at all,” yet somehow, in all its nothingness, still says ‘I exist somewhere.’
Abstracted, graffitied forms are reimagined as letters from a wooden typeset. Some are coated in what appears to be a wet, viscous black ink, suggestive of a scrying mirror – used in histories of divination to receive messages, visions, or prophecies by gazing into a dark, reflective surface – or the dark, reflective waters that Carl Jung once associated with portals to the unconscious.
Probing the subtle distinctions between divination, invention and discovery, Misreading Misreading explores the potential for abstract marks to behave communicatively when framed – or misread – as language. It fosters a speculative, poetic conversation – one between a misreader and someone who exists somewhere – that is not entirely of this world— but not apart from it either.
_____
Misreading misreading
Graffiti isn’t written by wrist and fingers, it is scrawled from the arm and shoulder. The resulting word/phrase/symbol has an embedded time signature of urgency, right now. A lot of graffiti isn’t completely legible, either on purpose or as a result of the artist’s chosen medium. Some works seem closer to a visual pattern, lace-like or even florid. The act of writing (or scrawling) across the external surface of a building transforms a city into a giant ledger book or noticeboard. What types of messages are urgent enough to warrant graffiti? The blunt, crude, and non-sensical sit democratically alongside the political and poetic.
We think of graffiti in terms of contemporary aerosol and marker tangles, but going back hundreds of years, graffiti also shows up as engravings – a much more time and labour-intensive medium. The persistence of graffiti across time and culture shows our collective impulse to mark, footnote, question, subvert and chide dominant culture.
Artist Tia Madden notices this scrawled language across cities in her travels – encompassing Athens, Cairo, and her home city of Western Sydney. Tia documents this graffiti with the specialist eye of a fellow mark-maker, creating an archive of forms. Tia is interested in the linework of these language fragments – the gestural, the squiggly, the looped, and the jagged. These forms are then meticulously recreated in plywood and stained with various resins, forming a strange alphabet in sepia tones. The pieces are carefully arranged along thin metal brackets which evoke letterpress pieces lined up along metal composing sticks. These extended shelves also conjure visions of an old museum archive, with multiple lost languages existing on the same shelf.
The gallery walls, much like the city buildings the original graffiti was scrawled onto, transform into lined paper, complete with ink splotches and a smattering of grammar. In a fitting coincidence, the collective noun for graffiti is a ‘gallery’.
Sharing the space with these forms are small, precise ball-point pen drawings. Each depicts a liminal space – a library, an archaeological site – with visual incursions which fragment and disrupt the image. Strong lines cut through the drawings, creating a gap in visual information, suggestive of a fold or even a scanning misprint. A drawing of multiple men’s suited arms reaching across fragmented space, akin to glass shards, is the most disrupted and curious of the series.
Each drawing, with their miniature scale, deckled edges and meticulous tonal hatching are reminiscent of black and white film photographs from another time and place. The composed pace of these drawings balances the tangled energy of the graffiti forms, providing curious pauses in the show’s score. An extension of grammar.
Standing between these two elements – the jumbled graffiti forms and the punctuated drawings – there is a palpable sense of this grammar: a smooth adherence to a foreign or lost system. The language of archives and cataloguing feels acutely settled among these works, and within Tia’s larger practice. A silent score of information, waiting patiently to be (un)deciphered by some future civilisation – misreading misreading.
– Nicole Clift
_____
Tia Madden is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator based on unceded Dharug land in the Blue Mountains, NSW. Working primarily across drawing and installation, her practice is concerned with the porous boundary between drawing and writing, the poetics of illegibility, and the potential for abstract marks to behave communicatively when framed – or misread – as language. Part speculative-fiction and part riddle, her work combines abstraction with the materials and rules of writing to create vessels for communication, even if they only speak in worlds outside our own.
Misreading Misreading
21 November 2025 – 14 December 2025
Supported by CreateSA and Forage Supply Co.
