Madi Feist is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Gadigal land in Eora/Sydney. Her current practice centres on collecting discarded materials, peculiar objects, and the mundane remnants of daily life. Using processes including assemblage, mould making and traditional handicrafts, she transforms material demarcated as junk into artworks that play on consumerist tropes and explore her experience of cultural in-betweenness. Her practice is concerned with the dystopian obsession with efficiency and disposability relating to contemporary urban life.
The overwhelming amount of material waste humans produce, consume and dispose of informs her materiality and process. Intuition plays a major role in formally guiding her works, as she almost exclusively uses reclaimed objects she encounters on the street or within the rhythms of her everyday life.
Everyday anxieties of uncertain futures are balanced with a cautious, humorous optimism, leaning into the ingrained absurdity and inherited narratives her objects can signify.
Guiding those narratives is a desire to understand her cultural identity. Being of mixed Filipino and Italian heritage, and Australian-born, Feist has often found it difficult to understand where she belongs within the diaspora. Her practice is a method of exploring and researching both micro and macroscopic cultural references, ranging from ancient mythology and folklore to family stories and personal anecdotes. Her choice to work exclusively with discarded and readily available materials is one way she incorporates Filipino ideals of innovation and resilience, including ‘pagpag,’ a Tagalog term meaning ‘shake the dust off.’ Her sculptures mimic familiar forms, yet on closer inspection reveal an uncanny materiality that encourages viewers to reconsider what is deemed valuable or invaluable; prompting reflection on where things come from, where they’ll end up, and why they matter.

Madi Feist held her first solo exhibition BAG LADY at Puzzle Gallery, Sydney in 2024, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including a commissioned work in ’How to dismantle the world...', Verge Gallery. She was the recipient of the Recycled Materials Award at Hornsby Shire Council’s Remagine Art Prize (2026), awarded Gosford Regional Gallery’s Emerging Art Prize (2025), and was a finalist in the Burwood Art Prize and Hazelhurst Art On Paper Award (2025). Feist holds a Master of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Darlinghurst. During her studies, was the recipient of the East Sydney Doctors Scholarship (2020) and the Derivan Prize for Mixed Media (2019).