VCA DESIGN & PRODUCTION
GRADUATE SHOWCASE
GRADUATE SHOWCASE
Madeleine Harris (b.2001) is a multidisciplinary designer whose practice spans across graphic design, printmaking and digital experimentation to create context-aware imagery and graphics. Guided by a neurodiverse way of seeing, she reasserts materiality within a contemporary design space that is often void of tactile expression. Her work is typographically led, often engaging with postmodern ideas of deconstruction and repetition.
During her time at the Victorian College of the Arts, Madeleine has developed an experimental, research-driven approach to design that transforms language and signs into visual systems.
Her practice is informed by discourse surrounding digital media’s anaesthetising effects, echoing Walter Benjamin’s (1935) observation of the “decay of aura” in mechanically reproduced works. In response, aleatory processes and entropy are reintroduced against accelerating dematerialisation.
Maxwell’s Demon
Three A2 inket prints, digital animation.
Maxwell’s Demon is a typographic experiment that investigates the intersections between referentiality, reproduction and abstraction through a process driven methodology.
Scraps/negatives of hand-cut letterforms are reconfigured into typographic iterations that progressively depart from legibility. The final iteration undergoes a digital decay, the letterforms eroding and re-organising themselves through
a reaction/diffusion algorithm. This approach transforms type from a medium of referentiality, reproduction, and legibility into one of abstraction and iconoclasm.
Drawing on ideas of entropy, this experiment explores how type might subvert its role as sign. The outcome is a functional display typeface with three weights titled Maxwell’s Demon, a homage to the thermodynamic thought experiment. Like its
namesake, the typeface sits at the juncture between chaos and order.
This typeface can be downloaded for personal use from my website.
A type specimen for Plainform type foundry's 2021 typeface, Ready.
A type specimen for Plainform type foundry's 2021 typeface, Ready.
My response for the 2025 VCA End of Year Exhibition