Working with sculpture via replicas, remakes, and ‘shopping’, Madeleine Pledge often uses the surfaces and structure of fashion and design to approach bodies as subjects and objects within systems of production and power.

“Works in the ongoing series volatility(triple image) consist of two photocopies printed over one another onto selected pages from editions of British Vogue. Reflectively framed in brushed stainless steel and polished aluminium, these ‘triple exposures’ emerged as a byproduct of the production process for my first sculpture in the public realm, superstructure (public image), commissioned by Devonshire Collective and currently on show as part of Eastbourne ALIVE in celebration of the Turner Prize.”  

“While scanning and enlarging the eyeholes of two balaclavas (re-made after Rosemarie Trockel in 2019) to form the patterns for sand cast aluminium parts of the commission, one of them was accidentally moved during the scanning process, producing a Missoni-esque zigzag. Appearing in previous work as large-scale blind embossed prints taken directly from knitted Missoni fabrics, I am interested in the erratic zigzagged layers of these patterns as cyphers for the volatile cycles of boom and bust.

In this particular work, an editorial image from British Vogue was chosen for its red, yellow, and blue colour scheme, as well as the conspicuous presence of the Adidas ‘three stripes’ logo – emphasising the the circulation of branded fashion and the primary colours involved in modes of image production. The granular deposits of the laser copy of the manually manipulated balaclava and a stocks and shares page from the Financial Times are overlaid onto this slick example of image-making, obliterating parts of the image and allowing colour and shape to re-emerge through the unprinted areas. Residues of the +/– pattern of the balaclava, as well as the rib knit of its eyeholes, are visible in places where they have been momentarily static during the copying process.”