the workers — Blog

I make art in small pockets of time on evenings and weekends. I like my ‘day jobs’, and am lucky to have them, but they are ‘low pay’ and I wouldn’t do them if I didn’t have to. I would be making art instead. And then some.

A few days ago a woman came into the gallery where I work. I liked her immediately. I wrongly assumed she was biding her time before hopefully showing her phone-art with the aim of securing an exhibition. This happens more frequently than I would like. I don’t have, or want, the power to dish-out exhibitions. I was wrong. She had studied Fine Art but now worked for a printing company, which she enjoyed. She said she was too poor to be an artist. When she left Art School she needed to get a job to pay the rent.

I get it.

For the past decade, or so, I have attempted to document the year by stitching newspaper faces to cloth. That’s the 2024 version, above. You can see the names of the ‘sitters’ here.

May begins today, and I haven’t started stitching this year yet. History tells me that if I don’t start in January, then I don’t start at all. There are worse things, I know, but I’m feeling incredibly sad about it. Attaching the ‘faces’, gradually throughout the year, provides my brain with enough delusion to convince it I’m making a lot of art. When in reality I’ve only completed one piece of work in the last three years, because like most working people I’m selling my time to pay the bills and have very little left for art making. This is NOT the same as having a ‘fallow period’. I am not having one of those.

I first started stitching paper faces on New Year’s Day 2015 (or 2014?) when a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door and gave me the Watchtower. From then on, every face that came through the letterbox was hand stitched to a large woollen blanket. At about 1,600 faces there was no space left, so I stopped. It took a couple of years, I think. I don’t have a studio, and had no place to store it, which resulted in its butchering. I cut it into sixteen pieces, you can see the top-left corner below.

I enjoyed the process and wanted to continue, but needed something more manageable, something smaller. So in 2019 (sitters list here), I started restricting myself to 365 faces, thereby documenting the year. I’d call it ‘The Audience’ and make one annually. So much for that.

Because of my exile, the 2020 faces weren’t stitched until 2021 (sitters list here). By now, I had an idea of how much space 365 heads needed and budgeted accordingly. Twelve months, spread over four napkins, each the perfect holding size. On account of there being a lack of newspapers for a huge chunk of the year, I replaced some faces with crosses from my parents’ prescription bags and little covid-thingies, both of which were in abundance. It was shortlisted for the Brixton Art Prize.

‘The Audience 2021’ didn’t happen. It’s a pile of dusty newspapers in the corner of my lounge. So is ‘The Audience 2023’ and ‘The Audience 2025’. However, ‘The Audience 2022’ was miraculously completed. Although, I’ve yet to document it so it’s not really finished.

An even bigger miracle is that I made two versions of ‘‘The Audience 2024’. One to sell, eventually. I hope. It just needs signing, dating and backing. I submitted it, unsuccessfully, for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

I’m hoping to show them all at the Barbican Library in August. Maybe I’ll see some of you there?

PS. There’s 15 tickets (from a possible 30) left for my art-talk-meal-thingy, and 48 prints (from a possible 50) left from my limited-edition-delaunay-do-da.

Christopher Madden is a County Durham born artist who lives in London. We were born in the same hospital. I was unaware of his existence until a few weeks ago.

In 1979, Chris drew a cartoon of Thatcher which was then used by the Socialist Workers Party for placards and posters. Other people copied the image for their own personal banners. In 1980, one such person drew the image, wrote ‘SMASH THATCHER’ underneath, and carried it to protest against the closure of Consett Steelworks (image above, full credits below). The Steelworks closed in 1980, with a loss of 3000 jobs. One of many closures, as Thatcher continued her axe-wielding across the North. The protest was photographed and printed in the Northern Echo, which is where I found the image. In 2022, I stitched it to ‘Shifting to the Moon’, a piece about greed and short-sightedness, the ridiculousness of the monarchy, how history keeps repeating itself, and how the posh lads are always in charge.

I grew up in Spennymoor which is 10 miles from Consett, and very similar. Nobody in my hometown liked Thatcher. Understandably. I’d never knowingly met a tory until I moved South.

In 2024, I submitted ‘Shifting To The Moon’ for consideration for the Royal Academy Summer Show. It was accepted. Alice Fisher, from the Observer, wrote an article about it, on account of me unsuccessfully trying to get work into the Summer Show for 30 years.

Chris read the article, recognised his cartoon, and got in touch via Instagram. Turns out he has a history of Summer Show rejections, too.

Credits:

Image 1- Consett Steel Workers’ protests, 1980. Northern Echo. Photographer uncredited.

Image 4 - Me with my work at the RA. Photo by Cassie Candle.

Image 5 - Chris’s original cartoon. A screenshot from his Instagram feed.