By Helen Reichert

Artist Maddie Hahn

Maddie Hahn is an emerging Colorado-based artist who explores memories through her art: how they are intertwined, sewn together, and torn apart. Her artwork involves natural motifs, and views nature as a fellow daughter and artist. Maddie employs historically feminized textile techniques such as quilting and embroidery in her creative process, often physically taking apart the canvas and stitching it back together to create a reimagined artistic surface, physically weaving together different memories. 

Also noteworthy are the accompanying poems. Maddie writes poems for each of her works that are physically stitched into the canvas, creating a piece of art that is both visual and communicative. Rainy Days Art Gallery is proud to house four of Maddie’s incredible artworks and their respective poems, which can be read below.

Blue is Church St. in July

Inspired by the way memories are torn, mended, overlapping, and intertwined, Blue is Church St. In July utilizes the traditionally feminine art of quilting to examine the relationship with the color blue and its pervasiveness in Hahn’s life. 

Maddie Hahn's Blue is Church St. in July, available at Rainy Days Gallery

My favorite color is blue.

All shades of blue.

It isn’t mere melancholy but also calm.

Blue is lightness and freedom,

Blue is wings,

Blue is quiet,

Blue is deep.

And more or less it is safe

Blue is Church street in July.

I miss my person

though they aren’t that far away.

They came right out of the blue

Just like that,

Just for me.

Cherryvale Road

Here, Maddie employs the popular quilting pattern Sawtooth Star, connecting this work to a longer lineage of art, specifically art made by and associated with women. This creates a work of art that is as inviting and full of stories as a grandmother’s quilt. 

Maddie Hahn's Cherryvale Road, available at Rainy Days Gallery

I have more than enough.

I wish I knew what I wanted.

I know I want to watch a garden grow,

step in from the cold,

warm my hands and tend to the bruises.

I want to grow old.

I want to let myself be a wild goose,

with kindness and grace,

And do it all with you.

I love you like the result of leaves on an aspen tree, and the crash of waves.

Sure, steady, quiet

I love you taller and taller

I am quiet

I take up space

I am free, I am a bird

It is something new– this feeling.

I like to think that means it will last forever.

Something that is just as sure as the leaves coming back each spring,

and the waves returning to the shore.

A Half-Remembered Dream

Maddie Hahn's A Half-Remembered Dream, available at Rainy Days Gallery

A half remembered dream

too young to know the difference

too trusting,

too hopeful,

too wide eyed.

Is growing up

just letting all that go?

Where does it go?

You are not made of wood and stone, you are real.

You are real.

You are real.

You are real.

My scars have healed

though the bugs still swarm.

This sweet solace— that perhaps

I never saw.

I Never Stay Where My Feet Are

Stitched together are different memories, creating a scrapbook-style composition of natural imagery and embroidery, giving the work an overall playful tone. The scenes Maddie has included in the work are familiar to anyone who spent their childhood outside and capture universal memories of playing in nature. 

Maddie Hahn's I Never Stay Where My Feet Are, available at Rainy Days Gallery

I took a step back today,

I took a step back and saw that I am so grateful.

Grateful for every tiny, joyous, heartbreaking beautiful moment that made

me,

So grateful to see it all put together.

For better, or for worse,

I never just stay where my feet are.

For better, or for worse,

I live in my head

Perhaps I live in the past,

Give it too much power.

But without my past,

Without my voice,

How else could I have arrived here? \

Now.