Contemporary Art – Christopher Madden

Kinetic art – Flight

Kinetic art: flight

Wooden spheres, plastic hands, thread. Approx 170x100x100cm (variable). 2022

A kinetic art work in the form of a mobile composed of spheres with wings. The wings are in the form of hands. In this video the mobile is positioned so that it is viewed against the sunset.

In this setting, with this lighting, the objects on the mobile resemble wheeling birds or similar flying creatures gathering at sunset and preparing for the night ahead.

The sound is the actual location soundtrack of birds’ evening chorus.

The work was originally created for my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens near Penzance in Cornwall in 2022. This video was taken in Zennor, Cornwall in May 2026.

The photograph below shows some of the winged creatures indoors.

Through the process of Darwinian evolution the wings of birds and bats (but not of insects) evolved from what were originally hands or claws, so the use of hands as wings in this artwork isn’t all that far-fetched.
Hob art

Photograph of hob cleaner sprayed onto a kitchen hob

Photograph. 31st May 2026

A photograph of the aesthetic effect of hob cleaning detergent sprayed onto a kitchen hob.

This photograph shows how aesthetically pleasing and significant images can be found in unlikely contexts.

To me the effect of the light catching the detergent on the dark surface of the hob evokes something cosmic, with the points of light resembling stars and the circles of the hob rings being some other cosmic phenomenon. The fact that the cosmic is being seen in the mundane is very appealing. In many ways the surface of a kitchen hob is as interesting (or possibly more interesting) as a vast panorama of stars in deep space. After all, there are uncountable billions of stars in the universe, but the number of kitchen hobs is strictly limited (even if there are other kitchen hobs on other planets).
Sculpture created by tying three hammers together

Sculpture created by tying three hammers together

Hammers, boot laces. 37x14x8cm. 2022

Hammers are designed to strike blows. By tying several of them together they lose this ability, being rended impotent.

It invites interpretation as some sort of metaphor. The work was created largely because the components were to hand, with the composition coming together spontaneously and subconsciously. That doesn’t mean that there are no underlying meanings to the work of course – after all, why did I choose to pick up a few hammers rather than a few bottles of washing-up liquid?

This work was created for and was first exhibited in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens near Penzance in 2016.

It’s designed to hang on a wall, however in the image here it is on a sheet of plastic on the studio floor because I like the effect.
Saddlehead

Saddlehead. Sculptural assemblage

Ceramic vessel, Brooks leather bicycle saddle, wooden stool. 145x60x60cm. 2010

An assemblage composed of a ceramic vessel and a bicycle saddle. The saddle is attached to a bicycle seat pillar which is inserted into the narrow neck of the vessel. The vessel is placed on a tall stool.

The zoomorphic effect of the assemblage is to suggest some sort of creature, possibly a bird. The saddle resembles a head and the ceramic vessel a body. The stool may be a perch for a bird or even legs.
Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2026: Interlinked Mints

Interlinked Mints

Polo mints, wood, acrylic. 2026. 17 x 3.5 x 6cm

My work on show in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026.

A sculpture composed of a sequence of Polo mints on a wooden base.

The Polo mints are arranged in pairs, with the two mints in each pair interlocked, with each mint passing through the hole in the other.

The mints are real Polo mints.

Polo mints are very sculptural in their own right, especially with the excellent typography of the word Polo in relief on them. The mints were originally produced in 1948 by Rowntree in the UK and were based on the design of the US confectionary Life Savers (which Rowntree previously produced in the UK under license).

The use of confectionary or other types of food in contemporary art is often a comment on consumerism. I don’t think that that applies in this case. Here I think that the prime subject of the work in the transformation on the confectionary into a sculptural form.
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.

The idea of people replacing the clappers in bells has since been used in the work Seaward Venice by Florentino Holzinger in the Austrian pavilion in the 2026 Venice Biannale. Holzinger’s work features real people dangling upside down in real bells.

There is a small sculptural version of my bell that features a real bell and a model of a person.
Procreate painting of Kew Gardens

Kew Gardens

Digital painting (Procreate on iPad). 29th March 2026

A digital painting created on my iPad on a recent visit to Kew Gardens.

Most of the art that I create is the product of my imagination rather than of what I can see in front of me, however I’ve always created sketches of the world around me, usually in sketchbooks.

The iPad, or any tablet, is a great tool for sketching. It’s very convenient, especially if you work in colour as you don’t have to carry a case full of colours with you.

I created this image soon after reading an article about a David Hockney exhibition – a Year in Normandie – which is currently on at the Serpentine Gallery. I obviously had Hockney in mind when I created this image.
Weird creature

Sketching from the imagination

Sketch using Procreate on an iPad. 24th October 2025

One of the great things about iPads and tablets in general is that you can just do a drawing at any time, anywhere. Sketchbooks are pretty good for that too, but things get complicated if you want to use colour.

This is a sketch I drew idly, with nothing specific in mind. Obviously it contains a number of themes and tropes that recur in my work; in fact now that I look at it it’s nothing but themes and tropes.

These tropes include the way that the subject of the sketch is floating just above the ground and the fact that the subject is in the form of what may be a hollow container such as a seed pod or a hollow exoskeleton from which a head and limbs emerge. Here the limbs are clutching a spherical object of indeterminate origin.

It’s all quite self-consciously bizarre.
Hemispheres

Abstract wall sculpture. Wood, plaster, sand, acrylic. 52x38x5cm. August 2025

Formation

An abstract wall-mounted sculpture composed of plaster hemispheres on board, painted with sand and acrylic paint.
Stilt Figure: ink drawing on watercolour wash.

Stilt walking woman.

Watercolour wash and ink drawing on paper. 2025.

This work was shown in Wells Cathedral at the Wells Art Contemporary exhibition 2025.

A pen and ink drawing of a woman walking on stilts that have wheels to help them to move along. The woman seems to be walking in the air for some reason. I’m not quite sure how she does it.

The pen and ink drawing is done using a traditional dip pen on a sheet of paper to which a watercolour wash had been applied. The wash was applied in several layers, the first of which was composed of Daniel Smith Lunar Black watercolour which was specifically chosen because it can create pronounced granulation effects, as shown in the images below.

The drawing was executed with a traditional dip pen.

A detail of the work showing the granulation in the Daniel Smith Lunar Black in the watercolour wash.
Hammerhead figure

Contemporary sculpture composed of found objects, wooden hemispheres and card.

Idol. 25x10x8cm. September 2025

A sculpture created from two hammerheads, two ball bearings, six wooden hemispheres and length of card. The parts are held together by magnets.

The central components of this work are two hammerheads – artefacts that have been recurring features of my work for many years, usually in the form of drawings and more recently in the form of small scale sculptural work, The hammerheads are usually, but not always, used to represent the heads of people or animals.

…….
Hemispheres

Sculpture

Sculpture. Wood, sand, papier mâché, acrylic. 31x31x6cm. 2025

Hemisphere sculpture.

A close-up of the surface of an artwork from my series featuring protruding and recessed hemispheres in flat surfaces.

This particular artwork is a wall hung sculpture filmed while lying horizontally. The interesting light effects are created by sunlight passing through trees outside the window. The texture of the artwork is created by mixing sand with gesso.
A painting about power relationships

The Tall Stilt Problem

Watercolour and ink on paper. 21x29cm. 2025

Exhibited in Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, July – August 2025

The painting depicts one of the aspects of power relationships.

It shows two people on stilts – one on tall stilts and one on shorter stilts. The tall stilts symbolise greater power. The person on the shorter stilts is sawing through one of the tall stilts. This symbolises the deposing of the powerful person on the tall stilts. Significantly, it is the fact that the stilts are so tall that makes them vulnerable to being sabotaged.

The work can be seen as a metaphor for one of the relationships between the powerful and the less powerful.

It’s also quite funny.
Black Whole II

Art and science: Black Whole II

Card, papier mâché, acrylic. 23x29cm. 2025

Exhibited at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, July and August 2025.

A work in my Black Whole series.

The works feature a hemispherical form protruding from the plane of the work and an equal and opposite hemispherical form receding into it.

The work was concieved partly as a visualisation of the positive and negative forces that underlie the physical structure of the universe. The concept is that at the most fundamental level of physical reality nothing exists except what can be thought of metaphorically as a flat featureless plane or surface. This featureless plane represents the existence of “nothingness” and is represented in the artwork by the flat surface of the work. A single disturbance to this plane creates a paired bulge and depression (just as a single wave creates a peak and a trough), represented in the work by the raised hemisphere and the recessed hemisphere.

The bulge and the depression are equal and opposite, so they can be thought of as cancelling each other out. As a result they add nothing to the “energy” at this fundamental level of reality. The fundamental plane is still. on average, flat. So, although something exists (in the form of the bulge and the depression), on average nothing still exists. The creation of ‘something’ does not alter the existence of nothing.

Nothing exists.

The work is painted very matt black to allude to the existence of nothing.
The generation of something from nothing

The generation of something from (almost) nothing.

Rows of dots interacting to generate circles. Digital This version: June 2025

This image is composed of multiple identical rows of dots with the rows arranged at regular angles to each other and with regular spacing. An animation showing the positioning of the rows of dots can be se

The circles in the image are formed as the result of the interaction between the separate rows of dots. There are no circles in the underlying components of the image. An idea of the underlying rows of dots in the image can be found by looking at the corners of the image where the number of rows is fewer.

I’ve produced several images of this type over the years since about 2017.

The work is linked to my interest in the scientific principles concerning the generation of complexity in the universe from simpler forms. Ultimately this involves trying to comprehend the generation of the most basic entities in the universe from something that’s just one step removed from nothing. It’s about the generation of something from nothing.

The work can be seen as a metaphor for the generation of complexity is any area of existence. It demonstrates the way that as soon as two entities interact (in this case rows of dots) something more complicated results.
Circles from straight lines

Circles generated from overlapping straight lines of dots

Digital animation June 2025

This is an animation of a work that I created in 2017.

It starts with a of a row of dots which are repeated and rotated to form a star shape. This shape is then repeated and repositioned in specific locations relative to the original star shape. The resulting patterns are then repeated and repositioned in the same way.

The pattern generated by the positions of all of the repeated dots that were in the original straight line contains multiple overlapping and interacting circles.
Hammerhead with steel spheres

Hammerhead with steel spheres

Steel sculpture: hammerhead with spheres 10x5x2cm May 2025

A sculpture composed of the head of a cross pein hammer with two steel spheres attached to its sides.

Hammerheads standing on end have an interesting anthropomorphic quality to them. This anthropomorphism is exploited in this work to create an ambiguous form.

The work possibly suggests a human figure with spheres in the place of arms. Or it could suggest the head of a creature such as an insect with the spheres as huge eyes.

The steel spheres are attached to the hammerhead by magnets.
Complex forms from simple forms.

Relative rotating grids creating complex forms from simple forms.

Digital animation June 2025

A work from my Complexity series studying the generation of complex forms from simple forms.

Identical simple grids of dots are superimposed and rotated relative to each other. The grid for this piece is shown below.

Simple algorithms dictate how the superimposed grids interact with each other. For instance where the same colours on each grid are superimposed on each other they cancel out to generate white and where complementary colours are superimposed they generate black.

The genesis of this series was my attempt to find a visual metaphor for the creation of the complexity of the universe from an almost absurdly simple starting point.

The basic grid that generates the pattern in this work
Visualisation: gallery wall mural about power

Visualisation of an art gallery wall mural proposal

Digital montage. March 2025

A visualisation of a proposal for a mural painted directly onto an art gallery wall.

The mural depicts a procession of people with extremely long legs.

A possible interpretation of the work is that the extreme height that the people have attained due to having such long legs comes at a price.

Physical height is usually thought of as being desirable in people as it is interpreted as a sign of power and strength.

However it has its drawbacks. Tall people tend not to live as long as shorter people, and in the case of the long-legged people in my image how on earth do they tie their shoe laces? Also, notice that they seem to need sticks to help them to keep their balance.

The physical height of the people can be taken to be a metaphor for power of more abstract forms, while the sticks that the people are using in order to keep themselves upright may be seen as metaphors for the methods which people in positions of power have to use in order to prop themselves up.

The mural in this montage was drawn on an iPad.
Sculpture from recycled materials

A sculpture made from parts of a builder’s pallet

Wood block and nails. 50x30x15cm 2003

A sculpture of assemblage composed of blocks of wood and rusty nails salvaged from an old builder’s pallet.

An example of up cycling in contemporary art.