Christopher Madden

humour

  • Power and its overthrow: mural visualisation

    Power and its overthrow: mural visualisation

    Digital visualisation 2024

    A digital visualisation of a proposed mural on an art gallery wall.

    The mural depicts two men standing on stilts. One of the men has much taller stilts than the other man. The man with the shorter stilts is sawing through one of the tall stilts.

    The image is partly a metaphor for power and attacks on that power. It’s also just a funny idea.

    The image can be interpreted as a metaphor for political power and opposition to that power. The person on the tall stilts is invested with the power while the person with the short stilts is wanting to topple the person in the position of power (as an act of rebellion against political oppression, military repression, economic exploitation or one of any number of engines of social or political inequality).

    The power that is personified in the image needn’t necessarily be the power of large scale institutions and entities, but could also be the power gained at an interpersonal level by an individual who has status enhancing qualities such as an appealing personality or striking good looks, making the attacks on that individual the consequence of personal envy or resentment.

    The man on the tall stilts represents a person in a position of high status or power. The structure of that power (the tall stilts) however makes him isolated from people with less power (the shorter stilts). This flaw makes him vulnerable to attacks from below, especially if the person below has a metaphorical saw.

    I’ve used a cartoon-like quality for the image is because the cartoon medium is the perfect way to convey the concept in the image. I think that cartoons are an excellent medium for political or social comment art as they can convey concepts directly and unambiguously. I’ve drawn cartoons for publication in newspapers, magazines and books since the 1970s. You can see my cartoons here.

    The large photograph on the wall in the visualisation is from a series of studies of skulls.

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  • Plastic milk bottle heads as a large wall mounted installation (visualisation).

    Contemporary environemtal installation – oversized plastic bottles

    Giant milk bottle heads

    Visualisation of wall mounted sculpture or installation. September 2018

    This visualisation is a development of my work in creating human heads from plastic milk bottles.
    The sculptural heads are vastly over-sized compared to the original plastic milk bottles.
    The size of the heads gives them an impressive air, similar to that created by, for example, Easter Island statues. The primitive markings that create the faces are reminiscent of ancient ritualistic statuary. These factors, the ancient and the impressive, give the work a tension due to the mundanity of the objects that are actually represented – discarded plastic milk bottles with fibre tip pen faces drawn on them.
    These heads are partly a comment on our throw-away consumer culture and the environmental hazard that it represents. The size of the milk bottles can be taken to represent the size of the problem of consumer waste, especially of one-use consumer waste (such as plastic milk bottles). The faces drawn on the bottles are partly a reference to the fact that it’s normal people who are generating the waste.

    The work reflects my interest in art and the environment (I created my first environmental art in the early 1970s).

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  • Study of the motion of water ejected from a hose spray head in pulses

    Study of the motion of water ejected from a hose spray head

    Video.    11 seconds

    A very short video capturing the motion of water as it is ejected in pulses from a conventional garden hose spray nozzle with the head set to different spray modes.
    The brevity of the water pulses makes it possible to see patterns in the spray that are normally concealed or are absent when the water is ejected as a constant flow.

    Water art installation or fountain study - water ejected in pulses from a hose nozzle
    A still from the video, showing the pattern created as a result of the pulsing effect

    This phenomenon is possibly a good starting point for a fountain or other water-based art installation.

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  • Humour in contemporary art – a headless classical statue with a graffiti face

    Humour in contemporary art - a classical statue with a cartoon head

    Humour in contemporary art. Defaced/refaced statue.

    Classical statue, marker pen. June 2015.

    A humorous work consisting of a headless classical statue with a cartoon-like face drawn onto the oval form of the neck.
    Part of the humor of this piece is the juxtaposition of opposites – the elegant and timeless form of the classical statue in contrast to the crudeness and immediacy of the contemporary cartoon head.
    The piece also contains dark humour and an unsettling quality due to the fact that the drawn two-dimensional head is occupying the surface created by the decapitation of the statue’s three-dimensional head.
    The drawn-on face also has the appearance of graffiti, so it could be said that the act of giving the statue a face is in fact defacing the statue. The word deface literally means to remove the face (as occurred with iconoclasm and the vandalisation of statues in the past), so the fact that the act of adding a face to a statue can be interpreted as defacing the statue is ironic.
    Humour is an important element in a lot of my contemporary art work. As well as being an artist I’m also a cartoonist, with my cartoons having been publishered widely in publications such as the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Irish Sunday Independent newspapers, and magazines such as Private Eye, the Spectator, Prospect, the Critic and more.

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