Assembled in Library (2026) are salvaged marks that may, or may not, carry meaning: inscriptions from ancient walls; lines from discarded paper or pottery shards; scrawled graffiti from the streets of Sydney’s western suburbs. All are recast as rusted metal forms that sit somewhere between ancient artefact, industrial scrap, and the type of an antique printing press.

Without clear knowledge of where these marks originated, when they were made, or what they meant to their makers, they linger in a space between sense and nonsense, meaning and non-meaning. We might think of them as uncoded: signs that are no longer—or not yet—tied to a language system.

Here, this uncode becomes an interface between us and an unknown other: someone who speaks with a code beyond our knowledge systems. The Library’s archive mutates with each reader who encounters it, and whilst meaning never settles, it does, in the words of Borges, endure: “illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.”

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Tia Madden is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator working across drawing and installation. Her practice explores 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. Combining traditions of abstraction with the materials and aesthetics of writing systems, Madden unsettles assumptions around how meaning is constructed, interpreted and culturally authorised.

For the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging), Madden presents a large-scale installation of rusted metal forms derived from inscriptions, graffiti and historical markings. Appearing at once as ancient artefact and industrial scrap, the abstract forms oscillate between language, image and object. Accompanying drawings explore acts of interpretation and divination, foregrounding (mis)reading as a culturally shaped process.

Recent solo exhibitions include Some Sort of Notation (2024–25), Firstdraft, Sydney; Misreading Misreading (2025), The Floating Goose, Adelaide; and The Uncode (2026), Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, Katoomba. Madden was the winner of the 25th annual Tim Olsen Drawing Prize (2025) and a finalist in Gosford Emerging, the M16 Drawing Prize and the Wollongong Art Prize (2025).