Madison Donnelly

Lives and works in New Haven, CT, USA

Artist statement

Madison Donnelly b.1992 Salt Lake City Did you know that horse hooves keep on growing- like human fingernails? When wild horses run, the friction of their hooves against the earth wears down their hooves naturally. When humans domesticated horses and began dressing them with horseshoes, this natural process was inhibited, and thus the horse’s hooves now require manual trimming. ‘Farriers’ are the name of the caretaker of the horse hoof, responsible for both trimming the hoof and attaching the shoe. Videos of farriers trimming hooves have emerged as a popular ASMR trend on TikTok for their ultra-satisfying and disgusting affect. Furthermore, if you Google ‘overgrown horse hoof’ you will be met with grotesque imagery. Like human fingernails, when overgrown, hooves twist into a spiral, resembling perhaps a horn or elf shoe- and the horse is disabled. An overgrown hoof, of course, can only occur when a horse is both domesticated and neglected. I'm interested in the potential for abuse that is created through ownership and domestication, as well as the elaborate re-engineering of nature that is required in trimming a horse hoof. These point at a backwards world where we run in circles to solve the problems created by capitalism, and mass production and consumption. In the same way that the Farrier solves a problem that its own species created, and in the same way that both ownership and neglect are present in an overgrown hoof, a bad landlord solves their tenant’s problems with...

Artwork