christophermadden

Proposal for environmental contemporary art: Tree of Life

Environmental contemporary art proposal: Tree of Life

Proposal for a mural. Image drawn: 2008

A proposal for a mural on a gallery wall based on a drawing of the Tree of Life that I created in 2008 as a pen and ink drawing.

The concept reflects my interest in environmental issues. I drew my first environmental images in the early 1970s.

The concept behind the image is that the Tree of Life, or perhaps more specifically the Tree of Evolution, has at the top of its highest branch a human being, signifying that within this concept the human being is the highest or most evolved form of life on the planet.

The concept is twisted however by the fact that in the image the human being, due to his elevated vantage point, can destroy the rest of life on earth as a direct result of his evolutionary position, with his highly evolved intelligence making him capable of designing and manufacturing guns). The Tree of Life becomes the Tree of Death.

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Art from everyday objects

Prestige

Prestige steel baking tray on front of glazed picture frame 46x60cm 2008

A work created from a mundane everyday object – a kitchen baking tray – mounted on the exterior of a glazed picture frame.

One of the motivations behind the work was to show the beauty and rich visual interest intrinsic in mundane objects from mundane environments.

Below is a detail of the intricate patterns and patina on the steel surface of the baking tray. The word ‘Prestige’ it the centre is an important feature.

I’ve been interested in the concept of finding beauty in the mundane ever since I admired the colours in the film of detergent on a wire mess kitchen utensil (maybe a cake stand) as it caught the sun. That was in my parents’ kitchen about sixty years ago.

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Kitchen sink art

Kitchen sink art: Tea pot in washing up bowl

Photograph. 2023

A photograph showing the rim of a tea pot protruding from the detergent bubbles in a washing up bowl in a kitchen sink.

The photograph is a good example of finding aesthetic interest in the everyday and the mundane. What can be more everyday and mundane than the washing up?.

The first time that I remember noticing such a phenomenon was a specific occasion when I was a child in the early 1960s and I was fascinated by the colours in the soap films that were filling the gaps in the mesh of a cake stand (or similar kitchen item). I specifically remember thinking about the phenomenon of the beauty of the soap films in the setting of the drab environment of the kitchen.

I’ve called this type of work Kitchen Sink Art in homage to the kitchen sink drama of the 1960s.

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Contemporary abstract art – Red Disc, Yellow Rim

Contemporary abstract geometric art: Red disk, yellow rim

Digital. May 2023

A geometric abstract painting produced using Procreate on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. This is a particularly useful way to create artwork, as the combination of tools lend themselves to particularly intuitive and spontaneous creations.

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Mirror art – waving fingers

Mirror art. Study for waving fingers.

Mirrors, cloth, person. 61 seconds. Nov 2023

A study for a work involving a triangular mirror box with an opening in one corner through which a person’s fingers are intruding. You may notice that the reflections of some of the fingers are noticeably blurred. This is because this study is using standard commercial mirror tiles which, like most mirrors, produce a reflection from the front surface of the glass as well as from the mirrored rear surface. Front coated mirrors or similar would avoid this problem, but they are too expensive for use in development studies.

The multiple reflections within the mirror box create a ring of fingers that look like a sea anemone or a strange and unsettling alien lifeform.

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Bell

Hanging man. For whom the bell tolls

Digital sketch December 2023

A sketch created using Procreate on an iPad.

The sketch shows a bell. Inside the bell, in the place where the clapper should be, is a hanging man.

The image came to me spontaneously while I was looking at a bell. I think that part of the idea may be that the bell marks out time, announcing the hours,and therefore marks out life.

Bells are also tolled to mark out death.

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Flight mobile sculpture – hands as wings

Flight.

Wood, plastic. June 2022. Solo exhibition, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall.

A mobile sculpture consisting of wooden spheres with plastic hands that form wings.

Hands are a recurrent theme in my work, as is flight. I’ve created several works that feature hands as wings, usually in the form of sketches and other drawings.

Using hands as wings is actually far from being far-fetched. The wings of birds and bats both evolved from hands (which is why birds and bats don’t have hands – it’s a choice of one or the other. Angels and fairies have both, but they are made up and are anatomically incorrect). Insect wings evolved along a different route, possibly from heat-gathering flaps or panels (insects being very dependant on the heat of the sun).

The symbolism of flight is linked closely with the concept of freedom. This link can be overstated, I think, especially when we project it onto the natural world. We envy the flight of birds, but birds don’t fly because they are free. Small birds that in theory can fly wherever they please often tend to spend their whole lives in a single place such as an individual tree. Some of them may migrate thousands of miles to reach their chosen tree, but they’ve possibly travelled there from another individual tree in a different part of the world. On top of this, on isolated islands that have no predators birds frequently lose the power of flight, so flying obviously isn’t one of their primary concerns.

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Expansion II

Expansion II

Digital animation. 2023

A digital animation composed of layers of expanding and radiating forms.

This work is from a series that explores the generation of complexity from simplicity by the interaction of simple forms to create complex forms.

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Architecture as abstract art

Architecture as abstract art.

Photograph. 1st December 2023.

A cropped photograph creating an image that is quite hard to interpret due to the lack of context or visual cues.

The railings help once you’ve realised what they are. It’s a photograph of the steps at Alexandra Palace railway station, London. Due to the cropping of the photograph the steps lose their significance as steps and only the parallel nature of the lines of the steps becomes significant, creating an abstract pattern.

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Light art

Light art.

Light box, card, paper. 480x360mm. November 2023.

Light art in the form of a light panel with a collage of cut paper and card.

The illuminated triangular centre of the work is framed by black card with a triangular aperture at its centre. The curved and circular geometric shapes are formed of cut pieces of card or paper. Some of the pieces are cut so that they are not quite perfectly regular. This hopefully gives the work a degree of added dynamism.

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Mirror Box Creating Infinite Reflections

Contemporary mirror art. Multiple reflections inside mirror box

Mirrors, paper, card. 2023.

Three mirrors joined to create a triangular box or prism, with the mirror surfaces facing inwards. On the inside bass of the box a number of semicircular pieces of card and paper are arranged so that their reflections create the appearance of complete rings.

Each of the mirrors reflects the other mirrors (and the reflections in the mirrors). The reflections in the mirrors include the reflections of reflections. This would result in an infinite number of reflections if the mirrors were perfectly reflective (and were optically perfect in other ways too), however there is a loss of light with each reflection so the reflections gradually become dimmer and darker.

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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I’ve been interested in mirrors and reflections for most of my adult life. While I was still at school in the late 1960s I ground an eight and a half inch (215mm) parabolic mirror for an astronomical telescope that I constructed. I used the mirror in this early artistic experiment. My first conscious encounter with infinite mirrors was a few years later when I was in a lift (elevator) while at university studying maths and physics. The lift had mirror panels on its walls.

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Leaping Stagman

Leaping Stagman

Digital print. 30cm x 21cm 2023.

This work was exhibited in Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery over the summer of 2023.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Anthropomorphic assemblage

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.

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Moiré effect generated by mesh and a mirror

Moiré effect generated by a mesh on a mirror

Concave mirror, plastic mesh. 8x8x10cm. July 2024

A study of the moiré patterns that are generated when a mesh is placed above a mirror.

The mesh is rolled into a cone shape which creates moiré patterns where the mesh overlaps itself.

A concave mirror at the base of the mesh creates an enlarged and distorted image of the mesh, further complicating the patterns that the mesh generates.

The mirror in this study is a convex mirror taken from a bicycle rear view mirror with the mirror inverted to expose the concave rear of the mirror. The mesh is the plastic mesh from a supermarket pack of easy peel oranges.

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