Honoring Our Land and Creating Consciously with Madison Dawne

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Photo courtesy Madison Dawne

Madison Dawne

Madison Dawne

Madison Dawne is an artist whose practice encompasses sustainably made prints, books, textile goods and more. She creates with the utmost intentionality when it comes to her ecological footprint, crafting using locally sourced, biodegradable and up-cycled materials. Dawne makes everything by hand whether it be carved, printed or bound. She operates her studio out of Riverwest and frequently vends at community events and markets throughout the year.

Originally from Minnesota, Madison Dawne first became interested in art by dabbling in photography in middle school. Her mother gifted her a film camera which allowed her to start seeing the world in a new lens. “For me it was all about capturing what was already there but with a certain perspective, and that was very pleasing to me,” she recalls. 

Dawne spent time living in Madison between high school and college before arriving in Milwaukee to pursue photography at UWM. “During my first year I discovered printmaking and fell in love with it,” she continues. “It was all of the things that I ever had interest in—tactile materiality, graphic design, photography, textiles, painting and drawing—all under one umbrella.”

She graduated from UWM in 2017 with a BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis on Print and Narrative Forms. As a student, Dawne facilitated the “PRT Steamroll” printmaking workshop at Milwaukee Maker Faire for two years in a row and also helped develop a Pigment and Paper Maker Farm. She officially launched her LLC, Madison Dawne Studios, shortly after completing school.

Environmental Consciousness

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Photo by Madison Dawne

Books created by Madison Dawne

Books created by Madison Dawne

Dawne credits coming from a family of farmers, artists and scientists as what instilled environmental consciousness in her from a young age. On incorporating such values into her practice, she elaborates, “I need there to be functionality and purpose with my art, and the idea that the materials are locally sourced so that we’re not creating more unnecessary pollutants is very important. With most of my products, you’re either using the object itself or it has a message that connects with you.”

All of the paper Dawne uses is made in either Wisconsin or at French Paper Company in Michigan, plus she grows plants that she uses for homemade paper and ink. Dawne hopes that by up-cycling materials, people will think more critically about how what they buy is being made. “A lot of the bags I make have an inner lining made from up-cycled denim jeans,” she uses as an example. “My family members will just send me their old jeans because they know I can cut them up and turn them into something else.”

Dawne frequently touches on themes of history, time and place in her art’s messaging. As such, many of her products contain imagery of Midwest and Wisconsin lore. “Local pride is such a big thing here in the Midwest,” Dawne notes. “There’s so much we can enjoy about where we come from, but we also have to honor the history that came before us. We’re living on Indigenous land with multitudes of culture that our schools didn’t always teach us correctly about, and the ecological systems that we’ve unbalanced to gather the resources that we think we’ll need as a society is important for us to understand about the land itself. There’s a lot to be said and there’s a lot to learn, all the time. The more we can inspire ourselves to learn about our past, the more informed we’ll be about how we can move forward as better people.”

Protect the Lakes

Her shop includes block printed books, Milwaukee and Madison map posters, honeycomb-themed zipper bags, Midwest colloquialism cards and inspirational banners. A more recent endeavor of Dawne’s has been her metallic prints. “When I discovered that Cranfield Metallic Gold is perfect on top of French black paper, it became my new obsession,” she laughs. “It inspired something in me so I have a whole new line of products with it.”

“Respect the Earth” is Dawne’s latest collection, featuring posters and banners themed around protecting the Great Lakes, defending the trees and loving our land. This series has been a long time in the making, as she explains. “My second-ever large scale block was “Love Thy Land / Save The Parks” for the steamroll printing at UWM so that’s how this entire series got started; the very first one I ever printed someone bought so that they could put rivets down the side and attach it to their RV so they could take it across the country to national parks. From there, I was reading about all the pipelines and pollutants going into the Great Lakes, so I created my next block about that, and then I created the third block ‘Defend the Trees’ based on what’s at the height of climate change.”

Dawne cites some of her career highlights as getting into Madison’s Art Fair on the Square, having one of her banners hanging in Discovery World and teaching her first book binding workshop at Milwaukee Artist Resource Network (MARN). 

She recently began volunteering studio hours at Anchor Press Paper & Print located in House of RAD, where there is now a community printmaking studio. Dawne plans to start teaching more workshops there on bookbinding, block printing and paper making. She also hopes to have her first solo show in the next year, saying, “I’ve been making the quality and quantity of work that could finally allow that.”

On the biggest things she has learned since launching her LLC, Dawne shares, “Time management is important and so is knowing your audience and figuring out which markets you’ll do well at. There’s going to be a lot of hit-and-miss those first few years; I’ve been doing this for six years now and just the other day I did a market that really wasn’t my jam. There’s also markets that you might apply to over and over again, but you just never get into and won’t know why. But you can’t let things like that stop you from moving forward and trying different things, and if you just keep doing what feels right to you with your creative process and doing it for the right reasons, then you’ll be fine.”

Madison Dawne will be at Milwaukee Makers Market on October 14, Ink Curds Printers Showcase and Fair on October 20 and 21 respectively, and then Milwaukee Makers Market again on November 5 and 25. Visit her website here to shop or get in touch.