Madeleine Sinnock

In the Travel Book series, these same busy collages of melted plastic in Comfort ⇄ Control are not overwhelming in their composition and size, but instead feel more like diaries: personal, mobile, digestible. The plastic comes from trash carefully collected in new neighborhoods across Southeast Asia and Europe over a year’s travel. Both the process of collecting materials and making the work provided ways for me to process my complicated feelings toward femininity as a nonbinary person, and my experience of gender in new cultures. In my home city, I often felt hurt by a lack of awareness or grace towards me, but in countries where I couldn’t speak the language, I found that being a recipient of compassion without recognition or understanding was enough. The work speaks to the experience of making overwhelming or opaque feelings more legible.