Fragile Structures: The Architecture of Decay
Exhibition | Fragile Structures: The Architecture of Decay
Artist | Fran Romano and Madeline Cardone
Dates | 30 July – 12 September 2026
Opening | Thursday 30 July. Artist Talks at 5:30pm, Opening from 6pm and Official Speeches from 6:30pm | RSVP here
Catalogue | Buy the Work | Room Sheet
Exhibition Statement
This exhibition is a collaboration between visual artists Madeline Cardone and Fran Romano. Working in glass and ceramics respectively, the artists share an overlapping conceptual and material language. Both are fascinated by the built environment, exploring ruins, decay, voids and architectural phenomenology through the deconstruction and reconstruction of space. They share a common cultural heritage that informs their practices and strengthens this collaboration.
Both artists have recently been exploring abstraction of form and space in a sculptural context. Ceramics and glass have common material properties, and both artists work in processes that seek to highlight and challenge the dualities inherent in these materials, notions of strength, fragility, permanence and transience. They explore the qualities of each material that are unexpected, highlighting the process of discovery in the outcome of the works.
Through an architectural lens, the artists explore how space is articulated, divided or transformed by materiality to invite reflection. Notions of stillness and contemplation are integral to both practices. The act of contemplation connects us to time's continuum and shapes how we relate to and encounter our environments past and present.
This body of sculptural work encompasses a collection of wall, plinth and floor based pieces. The works emphasise the tactility and surface qualities of the materials, encouraging viewers to enter the space and interact with the works themselves, experiencing a sense of structure and void. The artists aim to create an enveloping, comforting and private space within a space, mirroring the experience of entering an architectural environment.
Artist Biographies
Madeline Cardone is a graduate from the ANU School of Art and Design. Her practice is primarily sculptural, often exploring the thresholds between spaces, embodied memory, and material transformation, drawing on a broader interest in archaeological, anatomical and architectural theory. Her practice in glass connects ideas of space and bodily memory, often referring to the material as a ‘skin’. Her objects are not only formal studies, but are explorations of proximity and relationships between forms, people, the past and now. Cardone challenges the limits and lifecycles of materials, inviting slow, tactile contemplation and evoking a strange familiarity by recontextualising and abstracting space and form, further shifting an understanding and expectation of what materials can hold, reflect and become.
Cardone has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2017, and has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Bassett Downs Honours Scholarship in Glass (ANU, 2021), the Vicki Torr Emerging Artist Prize (Ausglass, 2022), and the Aldo Bellini Acquisition Award for Milano Vetro Under-35 (Milan, 2024).
Fran Romano uses the ceramic medium to explore themes of decay, loss, longing and nostalgia. Working intuitively, she builds a sense of history through layering on the clay’s surface. Using both found and handmade objects to create mixed-media installations, she draws on her Southern Italian heritage.
Offering space for contemplation, her works explore interiors, both physical and metaphorical.
A graduate of ANU School of Art (2013), Fran’s focus is on process-driven making. In 2023 she was awarded a Highly Commended in the ART EDIT Art Edit Self-Represented Artist Award and featured in that magazine. She has been a finalist in several art prizes including the North Queensland Ceramic Arts Award (2024), the Goulburn Art Award (2022); the Little Things Art Prize (2018).
She has been successful in securing artist residencies with C.R.E.T.A Rome, Italy (2023) and SkopArt studios - Skopelos, Greece (2017).