Description
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Shortlisted Artist
Madeline Cass [b.1993] is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lincoln, Nebraska, working across photography, poetry, artist books, painting, and drawing. Her practice is shaped by her upbringing in a monoculture state, where she explores overlooked wildness and the intimate relationships between art, nature, and humanity.
Acting as a translator for nature, Cass fosters dialogue through intimate interactions with the landscape. Her work invites viewers to connect with overlooked habitats, encouraging a deeper ecological consciousness and offering alternative pathways into understanding our place in the natural world.
Artist Statement | Memory is a prism, ever-shifting with time. The landscape, too, stores memory—bearing traces of what has passed and what is slipping away. My work often begins with paying close attention to overlooked ecologies: the edges of marshes, weedy lots, roadside wildness. I’m drawn to what is quietly resilient, nearly invisible, or on the verge of disappearance. The fleetingness of birds and fungi—appearing suddenly, vanishing just as quickly—feels like a language I’m still learning to read. These moments of ephemerality pull me in: they ask to be witnessed, not preserved. Photography is my primary tool for observation and poetic inquiry. I don’t approach it as a way to document facts, but as a way to hold questions—slow, intuitive, and open-ended. Images in my practice function like poems: suggestive, layered, and unresolved. They invite reflection, stillness, and attention. Sometimes they open doors; sometimes they echo back uncertainty. The wildfire sun haunts much of what I make—its saturated glow, filtered through smoke, is both arresting and uneasy. It’s a symbol of our moment: beauty coexisting with collapse. In that strange light, I see both grief and radiance. This tension sits at the center of my work, where visual seduction meets ecological alarm. The metaphor shapes how I think about the world now—fragile, burning, and still filled with something tender. The body appears in my images as both vulnerable and resilient—a reminder of our deep entanglement with the land. Ecosexuality offers me a framework for reimagining intimacy with the more-than-human world. Not as metaphor, but as lived relation: the earth as collaborator, kin, beloved. Through this lens, acts of care and attention become political, embodied, and necessary. We are living through the unraveling of extractive systems—ecological, political, economic. My work makes space for grief, tenderness, and the possibility of return. Amid collapse, I look for moments of connection. Even through smoke, the light comes through.
All print enquiries:
tom@opendoors.gallery
+44 (0)7769922824
