Christopher Madden

confectionery

  • Confectionery in contemporary art

    Contemporary art using confectionery

    Confectionery in contemporary art

    Polo mints, plaster, acrylic paint. 5x17x3cm 2026

    This is one of several sculptural works that I’ve produced using confectionery in the form of Polo mints.

    The chief inspiration for the work was simply the fact that Polo mints have a very sculptural form, due largely to their shape but reinforced very much by the fact that when placed in a sculptural context they can be mistaken for being made of white marble.

    The fact that the sculpture is composed of something as mundane as confectionery gives the work an intriguing quality due to the ambiguous nature of the mints. The mints look exactly like Polo mints, because that is precisely what they are, yet they also look like sculptural forms, especially due to the interlocking composition.

    One of the things that I like about this work is the way that it uses mundane confectionery to generate something which to me is more profound. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether it is actually more profound.

    There’s also an element of humour in the work, resulting from the dissonance generated by the fact that the sculpture is composed of mundane confectionary.

    This work was displayed in Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, July – August 2026..

    Confectionery in contemporary art

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  • Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2026: Interlinked Mints

    Interlinked Mints

    Polo mints, wood, acrylic. 2026. 6x17x3.5cm

    My work shown 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 due to their toroid shape and 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 shape of the confectionary into a sculptural form.

    sculpture composed of confectionery
    The interlinked Polo mints are attached to a wooden base.

    The interconnected mints may be interpreted in a number of ways.

    A single pair of interlinked mints can be thought of as having romantic connotations. They can be seen as being similar to a pair of interlocked wedding rings (the romantic connotations of the mints came to me before I realised that the same is sometimes done with wedding rings).

    The linked mints also suggest to me some sort of machine, with the vertical mints possibly being wheels. They also have the suggestion of interconnected cogs or machine parts, which reinforces the machine connection.

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