Peter Madden
Peter Madden | New Zealand b.1966 | The Nimble Jackal, It’s Face A Grimace Of Grasping Teeth “There are Gates Within Gates Within Gates” A Man Rolls His Right Eye In And Out To & Over A Rarely Preserved Ancient Mushroom And The Mushroom Said “Dead Mans Bread Death Days With Flesh Of The Deities Crystal Skull (Below) Is Attributed To A Knife Tongued Coyote (Right). An Inmate (Above)” (detail) 2005 | Watercolour, metallic foil and collage | 8 panels: 32.5 x 24.8 x 2cm (each, framed) | Gift of Henry Ergas through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2010 | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
In today’s world of unrelenting visual stimuli, it is necessary to process imagery — especially the photography in advertising, billboards and magazines — in the blink of an eye, and then move on or risk drowning in it. Peter Madden’s intimate suite of eight photograph-based collages defies such fleeting assessments. The brain’s processing reflex is pulled up short by Madden’s subverting of otherwise recognisable scenes and objects.
The collages in ‘Unnerved’ are grouped together under one epic title that, in itself, is an interesting extension of the way in which Madden creates his imagery. He calls it collage poetry — ‘all of the text is cut from the captions used by [National Geographic] to elucidate the given photo’. No doubt the Geographic’s editors never realised that such gothic references lurked within their copy.
Yet, there is humour alongside the fantastical and the weird in Madden’s images. In one of the works from The Nimble Jackal, a man stands at the site of an archaeological dig, proudly holding a human skull in his hands. But, seemingly unbeknown to him, the skull has sprouted hair comically matching his own, and has eyeballs raised slightly to the ceiling, as if in long-sufferance.
Madden also makes wonderfully elaborate three-dimensional papercut and sculptural works, and there remains a strong connection between these and his 2-D collages: ‘I suppose the 3d objects always had a surface of collage, of fragments that slipped and fluttered over and within them’. It is these fluttering and slipping fragments that make Peter Madden’s visual worlds — worlds that seem to tap directly into a constantly dreaming subconscious — so elusive and compelling.
