Madeleine Fenwick
Exhibition | Madeleine Fenwick | 2B Gallery
2B Gallery presents Thinking in Different Languages – Between Process and Material this October, the first solo exhibition in Malta by Madeleine Fenwick, a London-born, Malta-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves fluidly between painting, sculpture, drawing, and kinetic installation.
Madeleine Fenwick (b. London, 1988) explores gesture, rhythm, and cycles through an interdisciplinary practice examining how the body and mind experience motion, both in the present and through memory. Her works oscillate between balance and tension, precision and unpredictability, gesture and structure. As Dr Joanna Delia reflects, “Madeleine’s work is meditative, meticulous, and steeped in its materiality. She experiments by observing movement and transcending it physically – her process feels alive, in constant dialogue with energy and emotion.”
Since relocating to Malta in 2014, the artist’s relationship with the Grand Harbour has deeply informed her material language. “The limestone city of Valletta and the Grand Harbour shifted my focus from image to system,” she says. “They made me think more about how things are made and held together.” The rhythm of Malta’s maritime landscape and its mastery of engineering inform her sense of structure, balance, and light.
Her artistic journey extends beyond Malta to an extended sculptural development program in Mexico City, where she refined her sculptural and metalworking techniques under the guidance of international engineers and artisans.
Thinking in Different Languages – the core concept of this exhibition – lies an idea of translation of thought into form, and motion into matter. Madeleine invites us to “think in different languages”, not through words, but through rhythm, gesture, vibration, and transformation. Each material becomes a site of communication: copper, paper, pigment, or metal hum with residue and reflection. Sculptures suspend invisible architectures of balance and relation, drawings trace movement as memory. These works are not objects of observation, but instruments of resonance, tuned to the frequencies that shape perception and emotion.
Q+A
Your practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, and kinetic installation. How do you determine which medium is best suited to express a particular idea?
I test the idea against the behaviour of materials and see what carries it best. Each medium is a surface of translation. If it’s about trace and gesture, I draw or make monotypes that retain motion’s residue. For light and time, I work on smooth, polished metal — movement appears and disappears as you move. Printmaking taught me to work forwards and backwards; gestures can be pressed, lifted, and re-impressed until the idea finds its form.
Copper has become a central element in your recent work. What initially attracted you to this material?
It began with copper etching plates — I found the plates more compelling than the prints. The means of production became the subject. During the pandemic, I started painting on large copper sheets, which led me to learn metalworking to cut and form them. Copper conducts heat, electricity, and information. It records touch, oxidises like a slow memory, and turns light into a reflective rhythm, changing with angle, air, and hour
How has Malta influenced your artistic language?
The limestone and architecture of Valletta and the world of knowledge I found within the Grand Harbour made me think differently, shifting my focus from image to system – how things are made and held together. Collaboration in local workshops, alongside that luminous landscape, grounded my practice in processes.
You’ve collaborated with dancers, choreographers, and artisans. What do you gain from those exchanges?
New ways of listening. From dancers, I learn how gesture becomes pattern; from engineers and artisans, how process becomes mechanism. These collaborations calibrate my attention. The exchange is genuinely alchemical – more than the sum of its parts.
What excites you about showing this work in Malta?
Sharing the journey, from painting to object-making, from Malta to Mexico City and back. I’m excited to open a dialogue and show the works that have evolved quietly in the studio, shaped by material and time.
What do you hope visitors will take away?
A felt sense of the unseen, not as absence, but as the field from which matter, memory, and movement arise. If people leave more attuned to the pauses and intervals that connect experience, I’d be happy. Here, thinking can become a form of listening.
Interview by Michelle Amato, 2B Gallery PR, exclusively for The Malta Artpaper.
Madeleine Fenwick: Thinking in Different Languages – Between Process and Material:
2B Gallery, 1 Belfry Street, St Julian’s, Malta. 16 – 30 October 2025.
Open by invitation: www.2b.mt/rsvp.
Press & Sales Enquiries: Michelle Amato: pr@2b.mt
