Contemporary Art – Page 2 – Christopher Madden

Contemporary mirror art

Contemporary mirror art. Multiple reflections creating complete rings

Mirrors, wood, card, acrylic. 2023.

Two mirrors joined along their bottom horizontal edges are held at an angle to each other. Placed between the mirrors are three painted card sections of circles. Multiple reflections of the sections of card around the axis of the joined mirrors produce full circles. There are six reflections (or multiple reflections) in the mirrors, creating a full circle composed of seven sections.

A second component of coloured card is lying flat on the surface beside the mirror structure. The shape and colour of this second construction add another dimension to the assemblage as a whole. The fact that this part of the piece is in two colours and that it forms only part of a ring add to the resonance of the structure.

Below is a video of the sculpture. Because of the nature of the multiple reflections in the mirrors it’s particularly important to see the sculpture from different angles.

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Conic construction in a landscape

Conic construction in a landscape

Watercolour and gouache with digital additions. 2023.

A watercolour and gouache painting of a cone in a landscape, with additional features added digitally.
The original watercolour painting was scanned to create a digital file to which additional features were then added in Adobe Photoshop. The digital additions were created as spontaneously as possible, without too much conscious consideration. The results are similar to other works that I have produced using the same process, but I suppose that’s only to be expected. Next time I’ll consciously try to do something different.
The image partly resembles a creature of some sort, maybe with a beak and what may be an eye. If the white blob that may be an eye had a dot inside it, it would obviously be an eye, but it would lose some of its slightly sinister mystery.
Maybe it’s not an eye at all. Maybe it’s a hole in the top of a wigwam. Those straight lines protruding from the top of the cone look a bit wigwamy now I come to look at them.
Photography as abstract art

Photography as abstract art.

Photograph. May 2020. Zennor, Cornwall.

A photograph as abstract art.

I took this photograph because when I looked at the object in the photo in real life I was surprised how much it was transformed by a particular quality of light so that it resembled an abstract artwork.

It’s a photograph of a window in my house.
Drawing from the imagination: Strange clothes, strange propulsion

Drawing from the imagination: Strange clothes, strange propulsion

Digital sketch. 16th July 2023

A quick sketch from the imagination drawn using Procreate on an iPad with an Apple Pencil.

I find that drawing quick sketches with no particular end in mind is an excellent way to open up to new possibilities. Obviously the same themes and styles keep cropping up, but often with minor variations that move the sketches off into different and new directions. That’s the nature of evolution of course – small changes over time gradually end up creating something new.

I’ve drawn quite a few sketches of people or strange creatures that seem to have a wheel instead of legs. Haven’t managed to work out why yet.
Contemporary mirror art – Yellow Ring

Contemporary art, mirror art. Yellow Ring

Mirrors, wood, card, acrylic 2023

A sculpture exploring reflections in mirrors. The sculpture is composed of two mirrors set at angles to each other so that they show the reflections of each other and thus show multiple reflections of objects reflected in them.

Resting on the mirrors is a curved length of yellow card that forms a quarter of the circumference of a circle. Multiple reflections in the mirrors turn the quarter of a circle into a complete circle.

From some viewpoints only part of the circle can be seen, giving the effect that the circle is somehow partly disappearing – a form of optical illusion created because the brain can’t interpret what it is seeing properly.
Snail

Contemporary art print. Snail

Digital photograph. June 2018.

A contemporary art print of an old snail shell on the top of a cylindrical marble plinth. The snail shell has lost all of its colour due to its age and the amount of time that it had spent outside in the elements. It is now almost indistinguishable from the marble of the plinth on which it rests.

The photograph is taken from a small sculpture that I created from a snail shell found in my garden (It’s the shell of a common garden snail, cornu aspersum).

One of the things that I like about this piece is the fact that the old snail shell is incredibly fragile and light while the marble is hard and heavy, yet they both look remarkably similar on the surface. It is a piece partly concerned with the nature of superficial appearance. It’s also aesthetically pleasing, with all of those curved and rounded forms.

The fragile snail shell evokes feelings about the fragility of nature and the environment in the time of the ongoing environmental crisis.
Anthropomorphic sculpture

Anthropomorphic sculpture from found objects.

Mole wrench and oil can cap. October 2023.

A mole wrench and an oil can cap create an anthropomorphic sculpture suggesting an embracing couple.

The sculpture came about when I was about to put teak oil on my kitchen worktop, which was something I’d been putting off for the previous five years. The cap of the tin of teak oil was rusted in place due to lack of use and I had to take it off using a mole wrench. Holding the resulting wrench and cap combination instantly I sensed the potential for it to be a work of art in some way, partly because the oil can’s cap resembled an eye when the light struck it. At first I thought that the assemblage perhaps resembled a fish, but after a bit of turning it round in my hands I saw human forms emerge.

This is a good example of the way that people can interpret objects differently to the nature of the objects themselves. I believe that our brains interpret things based on a hierarchy of significance. The brain sees something and then scans down a list of likely possibilities for what the thing is, with highly significant things at the top of the list. At the very top of the list is ‘human being’. Very much lower down the list, if it’s on the list a all, is ‘mole wrench’. When you see a mole wrench in a tool box you automatically go straight to the ‘mole wrench’ item way down your brain’s list, because the context in which you see the wrench is strongly suggestive that it is indeed a mole wrench that you’re looking at. However, in the context-free setting of the photo above your brain has to work harder and has to consult its built-in list of possibilities, at the top of which is ‘human being’. The wrench possesses something of the shape of a human form, and thus the connection is made. The fact that the wrench is standing in a way that no mole wrench in the real world could do without support helps to amplify the effect.
Bicycle Saddle

Ceramic vessel with bicycle saddle.

Sculpture. 2021.

A ceramic pot with a bicycle saddle. The bicycle saddle is attached to a conventional bicycle seat pillar which is inserted into the narrow opening at the top of the ceramic vessel.

In the context of the sculpture the shape of the bike seat automatically evokes the form of an animal head.

Whenever the words bicycle seat, animal head and art are mentioned in the same sentence the name of Pablo Picasso and his 1942 work, Bull’s Head, inevitably come to mind. But we mustn’t let the great man’s work prevent the rest of us from using the same idea. He probably wasn’t the first person to think it up anyway, just the most famous. Remember, it was him who said “Good artists copy. Great artists steal”

In my sculpture the bicycle saddle doesn’t only suggest an animal head. Something about its shape also evokes the concept of a sail or of some form of crest shaped modern architectural structure.

Below is a variation of the sculpture where I’ve cleaved the saddle firmly to its animal head incarnation by adding a pair of headphones. The headphones have the pleasing effect of looking like a weird pair of eyes as well as a pair of headphones. The idea of adding the headphones came to me simply because there was pair of headphones lying on the floor next to the sculpture.
Doll

Sculpture. Found objects. 2023

An anthropomorphic sculpture made of found objects.

The doll’s head was found buried in my garden and the empty custard carton was found in my kitchen.

The custard carton has been squeezed to extract every last bit of custard from inside. It was a simple matter to create a ready-made sculpture by attaching the doll’s head to the cap of the carton, especially as the head was rather sinisterly only the front of the head, thus it possessed a convenient rim that could be gripped by the carton’s screw cap.

With the doll’s head attached, the custard carton is instantly transformed from being a crumpled piece of consumer waste into a doll’s body or a baby’s body. A quite disturbing body at that.

The interpretation of the carton as a body in this sculpture is the result of the phenomenon of pareidolia, which is the tendency to see significant forms where they don’t exist (Faces in clouds and such-like). The presence of the doll’s head helps of course. Art, especially modern and contemporary art, is hugely reliant on pareidolia, as it allows a circle with a couple of dots inside it to become a human face.
Seeing the world from an unusual angle

On the escalator. Seeing the world from an unusual angle.

Video. 45 seconds. May 2023

A video of people going down an down escalator at a London Underground station. I was going up the up escalator.

The video was shot at an angle so that the sloping architecture of the escalator occupied the horizontal plane in the video.

One of the metaphorical points of the video is the idea of looking at the world from unusual angles as a way of getting away from conventional ways of thinking and of conventional perception. It’s also quite humorous, which is something I often strive for.

Tilting the world to unusual angles is a concept I’ve pursued multiple times. An early example was in the early 1970s when I toyed with the idea of writing a short story about an isolated community that lived in a town half way up a very steep hill. The hill was so big that the people couldn’t see the top or the bottom, so they didn’t realise that they actually lived on a slope. All they knew was that there was a strange force (gravity) that meant that objects were only stable when they were at a particular angle to the ground and orientated in a particular direction. And that walking towards one side of town (uphill) was quite hard work, while walking in the opposite direction (downhill) was easy.
Circles and rays

Circles and rays

Digital. 2022

A print taken from a digital animation of expanding circles and rays.
The work is related to my interest in both art and science, and is inspired by the concept of the expansion of the universe.
I’ve been interested in both art and science most of my life. In fact in my youth (over fifty years ago) my ambition was to be an astronomer. I even constructed my own astronomical telescope, including grinding the parabolic mirror, when I was a teenager.
Environmental art: watercolour tree

Watercolour: Tree

Watercolour on paper. 2023

A watercolour painting from the imagination, depicting a tree in a sinister landscape. The dark foreboding atmosphere of the painting is partly to reflect the atmosphere of the ongoing environmental crisis and partly to reflect the atmosphere of thinking about it.

The tree looks as though it has uprooted itself and is trying to get away from its environment by using its roots as limbs. Alternatively, maybe the ground around the tree’s roots has been washed way as part of environmental degradation (perhaps by floods caused by climate change or by people’s exploitation of the land), literally sweeping away or undermining the foundations of a sustainable environment. And what are those objects next to the tree?
Stilt Walker

Stilt Walker

Digital. 2023

A digital sketch of a person on stilts. The stilts have wheels.

Stilt walkers have been an occasionally recurring theme in my work since about 1975.
Art about oppression – contemporary political sculpture

The Oppressor Empaled. A sculpture about oppression.

Hammer, nails, wood. 18x34x26cm. May 2023.

This sculpture is a work of political art, in the form of a metaphor for oppression and rebellion.
The work shows a hammer empaled by nails.
Part of the concept behind the sculpture is that the hammer is being impaled by the objects that it normally hits – the nails. The hammer is a symbol of oppression and dictatorship and the nails are symbols of the oppressed.
But the sculpture poses a question – how did the nails manage to drive themselves into the hammer? Nails by their nature need a hammer, or a stand-in for a hammer, in order to be effective and to fulfil their purpose. Were the nails hammered into the hammer by another hammer? In that case the nails are not a metaphor for the oppressed rising up against their oppressor (the hammer) using their own power, but are more like the followers of another power (another hammer?) that may turn out to be as oppressive as the hammer that they’ve empaled.

The leaders of liberation movements against repression often become oppressors or dictators in their turn.

This sculpture is a development of an idea that I had in 2010 when it started life as a drawing of a hammer with three nails driven into it.
Since then it developed into a 3D sculptural work composed of a hammer nailed directly onto a flat surface as though pinned down.
The iteration here has the hammer suspended above a surface and with many more nails driven into it so that it’s starting to resemble a nail fetish figure.
Surreal sea creature. Drawing from the imagination.

A surreal sea creature drawn from the imagination.

Digital image. 6th May 2023

A bizarre sea creature created digitally in Procreate on an iPad. The shape of the sea creature is based on the number six, as the image was created as part of an exercise in which I sketched several images on my iPad based on the numbers between zero and nine. The concept behind the exercise was that by having to take into account the restraints of including a number in each image I would be forced to work with forms or shapes that I might not think up straight from my imagination.

When creating the sketch I was attempting to produce a bizarre, weird and sinister image. The result looks as though it owes a debt to surrealism, dada and the symbolists.
Three lengths of wood on a rock – land art

Land art, Cornwall, UK

Wood battens, acrylic paint. Length: 2m (variable). June 2018.

This piece of contemporary sculpture or land art was created on the granite rocks on the top of Zennor Hill in Cornwall, near where I live. It’s composed of three lengths of 2×2 inch wood batten of the type used in construction and joinery, painted with acrylic paint.
Contemporary art watercolour painting with digital additions

Watecolour painting with digital additions.

Watecolour painting using collage (April 2021) with digital additions (Oct 2023).

A spontaneous semi-abstract watercolour painting with additions in Adobe Photoshop (added several years later, so it’s not that spontaneous).

The watercolour rock-like object is collaged onto the sky, with the line work added later digitally.

The painting is meant to have a sinister edge to it, with the rock-like form being some sort of creature. I’m very interested in the way that people see some creatures as being cure (baby mammals, especially furry ones being a prime example) and other creatures as being repellant (even at the baby stage).
Dada and humour: Duchamp Fountain with added spider

Contemporary Dada: Duchamp Fountain with Spider

Digital image. April 2023.

A digital image based on Marcel Duchamp’s Dada artwork, Fountain. Fountain is a ready-made in the form of a pissoir. The version of Fountain in the image is in Tate Modern in London (Duchamp created several versions of the work using different pissoirs. The original version no longer exists).

In this work a spider is trapped in the pissoir in the same way that spiders are trapped in baths.

The spider hopefully adds an extra touch of humour to a work that is already humourous. The humour partly resides in the fact that it’s unusual to see a spider where you don’t expect to see one (in an artwork), but at the same time the spider is exactly where you’d expect to see one (trapped in a piece of bathroom sanitary ware).

I’m a frequent visitor to Tate Modern, and whenever I look at Duchamp’s Fountain I’m struck by how esthetically pleasing the form of Fountain is. I’m not sure whether or not Duchamp thought this himself or whether he chose the pissoir with no esthetic considerations involved.
Striding figure

Striding figure

Digital sketch April 2023

A monochrome sketch, created using Procreate on an iPad, depicting a striding figure.

The work is from the imagination and was created spontaneously with no specific concept in mind.
Rectangle on legs

Rectangle on legs

Gouache, acrylic, collage 30x40cm February 2022

Is this a lopsided building on stilts or a rectangular creature lumbering across the painting?

The black rectangle was placed on the sky for no particular reason other than that the rectangle was close to hand. It then became whatever it is.