About Madai Taylor

I was born on Bunker Hill in Lake Village, Arkansas, a small town south of the Mississippi River, down in the Delta, an area stricken by racism and blighted by deep poverty.

As a child without shoes on my feet I would jump off the front porch of the dilapidated old house where I lived to play in mud puddles, after heavy summer rains. I can still feel the thick, soft earth gushing through my toes and caked around my feet. Wet dirt would flow and fasten itself around my fingers as I made tiny mud figures.

I discovered my gift for art as a child playing in the mud and scratching images in the dry, parched and crusty earth. One of the earliest memories of my artistic ability was a drawing of a horse’s head at the age of eleven, which gave me instant gratification that I shall never forget. In this exhibition which I call “A Measure of Grace,” I have used dirt in a non-objective, expressionistic way to create a vocabulary symbolizing my ideals and values. I have often referred to my childhood for inspiration, especially that child-like quality of free expression. In so doing, I discover myself back in the Delta, playing in the mud again, using that medium that I grew to understand because of the time I spent working with it.

Dirt intrigues me as a medium because it has unique characteristics, rare tones, gradations, and textures that lend themselves to an immense, versatile range of possibilities. It allows me to express infinite space and spiritual universes that exist beyond the visible world in a medium that is timeless and of the soul. The earth I use is the common thread we all know intimately from the moment we enter into the world and take our first steps as children. Earth is there to secure our every step and to catch us when we fall.

The works in this exhibition are introspective metaphors. To develop them, I poured out all my previous notions of myself as an artist, all my doubts and fears. Believing that I possessed the Spirit to express a unique visual interpretation of grace, I allowed myself to be free; I am truly naked in these images. To do this, I have explored many layers of emotion, revealing what is concealed by the obvious or apparently real.

True creativity is the ability to birth raw, authentic artistic form, a new creation that broadens consciousness. Talent alone will not suffice. Each image must be a combination of skill and originality that work together to produce artistic expression that is powerful, provocative, captivating, sophisticated and, finally, timeless.

-MADAI
Born Lake Village, Arkansas, July 1955