About My Artistic Practice

– Finding, elevating and connecting overlooked human stories through art

By Madelin Wilian

Artistic foundation – from illustration to my own narratives

I work across media with human stories, participation and community. My art explores how life stories, vulnerability and diversity can be transformed into aesthetic works that create connections between people and link the present with art history.

Throughout my artistic practice, I have explored the stories and people who often exist at the margins of society or between established categories. Although I work across painting, graphics, illustration, performance, literature, music and public art, my practice revolves around the same questions: How do we create community? How do people carry their life stories? And how can art make the invisible visible?

I began painting murals at the age of 16. Shortly afterwards, I was contacted by the publishing house Gyldendal and worked for several years as an illustrator. This became an important part of my artistic life, where I learned to communicate through images and transform other people’s stories visually. At the same time, I pursued a broad artistic education at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, because I wanted to explore all the possibilities that art could contain. With the emergence of new media, I experimented across techniques and forms of expression, because the idea has always been more important than the medium.

My own books were rooted in social realism and often featured the outsider as the main character. In The Great Space Pizza (Den store rumpizza), a boy in a wheelchair saves the world precisely through what others perceive as his limitation. In my books, I explore youth, vulnerability and alternative communities, while the picture book We Work (Vi arbejder) includes the bottle collector and the street paper Hus Forbi sold by homeless and socially vulnerable people, as natural parts of the shared social landscape.

From life stories to participatory art

In recent years, this interest has increasingly developed into participatory art. My projects often emerge from encounters with people and their stories. At Ørestad Care Centre, I created the work Life Imprints on the Staircase (Livsaftryk på trappen), where 21 paintings were developed from the residents’ own life stories.

In Lundtoftegade, I worked with the residents’ many cultural backgrounds and created paintings that were open to different interpretations while also bringing beauty and identity into a socially vulnerable housing area. The project was subsequently presented at SMK POP UP Friday on 31 May 2026.

In my three-month artist-in-residence school project Old Voices – New Images (Gamle stemmer – nye billeder),  I worked with three 5th grade classes from Nørrebro Park School. The students interviewed residents from three local care centres about their childhoods and life experiences. The purpose of the project was to strengthen cooperation, respect and curiosity between generations and to create inclusive artworks where both the students’ and the elderly residents’ perspectives were transformed into images.

For several years, I also created an art workshop with female asylum seekers, where we worked with street art, knitting and text. Here, art became a way of connecting women across borders, discovering similarities in our stories and recognising a global sense of community.

Art as a collective act – body, movement and community

The performance work Body Wheel, developed for Art Matter Festival 2025 and later invited to Basel Art Week 2026, continues this exploration of community and participation. The work was inspired by Asger Jorn’s experimental approach to graphic art, which I wanted to carry forward into a contemporary and inclusive form. Where Jorn created graphic prints using a motorcycle, I wanted to continue the idea by creating graphic prints using wheelchairs.

Together with five wheelchair users at Ørestad Care Centre – and later seven local wheelchair users at Basel Art Week – we created works through a shared performative process. The wheels of the wheelchairs created imprints together with our bodies in collective movement. I wore wheels on my costume and participated dancing in the work, allowing the traces of the wheels and the movements of the bodies to merge into one shared graphic imprint.

For me, Body Wheel is about carrying an art historical idea into a contemporary practice, where participation, inclusion, the body and community become the artistic material itself.

Art, society and overlooked voices

I grew up in the Cohousing project "Skråplanet", Værløse - DK, where community was a fundamental way of life. Therefore, my practice continues to revolve around relationships between people, trauma, prejudice, care and the shadow sides that both separate and connect us. For me, art is a space where different experiences can meet and where individual stories become part of a larger shared history.

This interest in the role of art in society is also expressed through my writing and participation in public debate. I have written several opinion pieces about the role of art, including art as a tool for health and equality in the music industry. Here, I explore how art is not only capable of creating aesthetic experiences, but can also be a force for wellbeing, visibility and change.

New works – historical voices and human stories

My current work includes a portrait series in oil on canvas of people I have met throughout my life, all of whom have experienced serious crises and emerged with a particular strength, wisdom and presence.

At the same time, I am working on a historical novel exploring women in world history who have often been overlooked or forgotten. Women who were ahead of their time, were criticised or shamed during their lifetime, but who had the courage to create independent lives and open new paths.

The same interest in overlooked stories exists in my musical and lyrical work, where I bring forgotten female artists such as Luzie Mandix and Rasputin’s daughter into the light and tell their stories. With Skt. Stefans Session, I worked with reinterpreting well-known Danish hymns through new music and a new spirituality, where a gendered image of God is replaced by nature and the universe as creative, connecting and healing forces.

These different artistic paths all emerge from the same investigation that has been at the core of my practice for many years: the human being as a story, overlooked voices, and art as a space where we can recognise ourselves in one another.