Cat Madden’s Mind Wandering Corridor at Hidden Door 2022 (composed as part of a Writing Workshop run by HD Team Member Rhona)
On Saturday 10th June I attended an Art Review Writing workshop at Hidden Door Festival 2022. This year Hidden Door was held at The Old Royal High on Calton Hill, a prominent, imposing, dark, under-utilised building in the very centre of Edinburgh with views across Canongate to Arthur’s Seat and The Crags.
We were introduced by Hidden Door Team Member and workshop leader Rhona Sword to some concepts and framing ideas, analysed some articles, discussed key findings in terms of style and approach, then were let loose to choose a work to respond to. The idea was to then submit the writings to be published on the Hidden Door website, but I rather missed the boat, not finishing and submitting my writing until yesterday, once their post was already published. You can read some of the other reviews here.
Mind Wandering and Art Questioning
Cat Madden, Wall Collage, 2022.
I have to be honest, my first reaction to the work I am about to detail here was not entirely favourable. It was, simply, “no”. But, after a brief sojourn around the Visual Art offerings on show in the west wing of the crumbling Old Royal High, I found that it was the only work that for me provoked a reaction I could sink my teeth into.
In a tight, dim corridor, between stairwell and bar, with the dark intoning of an adjacent video-artwork spilling into the atmosphere, is a riot of colour and paper. This is Cat Madden’s mind wandering wall-collage, assembled in a part classroom-wall, part-studio-floor-after-a-particularly-intense-bout-of-inspiration-style, combining mediums as diverse as crayon, pencil drawing direct on the wall, printed intaglio plates and puckered and pocked paper scraps. Geometry clashes and blends into intense abstract colours, the edges of green tape peel, a large clock spiral spins out of peaches, pinks and vivid yellow. At the far end of the corridor, there is a dark salmon-coloured plinth on which sits an Artist’s Book, labelled for “those who get bored easily”. It seems slap-dash, quick. I don’t like it. It is frantic. It is chaos. It is not Art.
One of the other workshop-participants is also here. He has been watching the audience interact with the work, observing their responses in real time. We pace up and down, stopping and standing, examining from different angles. Closer, further away. We shuffle around the thick flow of visitors, and exchange a couple of observations. We have gravitated to something here, but what?
We are in a building which has seen many uses over the years - the most prominent of which was as a school. Madden’s spinning, clashing ideas, colours and mediums spreading and multiplying across the walls could easily represent the timetable of a modern High School Pupil: ricocheting every 45-50mins from Physics to PE - from Art & Design to Geography - from Technical or Computer Science to Biology or History. Just as easily, they could be the idle doodlings of a bored and disengaged pupil, sitting at the back of the class, gazing out the window, entertaining themselves as an ageing teacher drones on about syntax.
Madden works in loops. Everything is both connected and unconnected. Leaning into a self-perpetuating cycle from scraps into art, she plays with the relationships of one medium to another. She imbues a sense of fun into her work, and this translates quickly from the wall to the viewer. This, I think, is one of the things I don’t like. It isn’t careful, it doesn’t seem planned. Shouldn’t Art be torturous, laborious, hard-won with a level of perfect execution that only few geniuses can achieve?
Then it hits me. I am stumbling on my own prejudice. I am caught between the playfulness and fun (the clash with the dirt, the grime, the ‘someone just *made* this’ from ‘nothing’ sense) and prevailing cultural notions of what Art “should be” and “should look like”. As I stand in this corridor, a challenging of notions that I should have left behind long before now is happening.
Like a light switch, I suddenly see the work properly. It isn’t the mad expression of a doodling teenager, it is Art. There is aesthetics, there is thought, there is intention. Sure, the work is not situated in clean-lined, white space. So I am not being signalled via the context that it clearly “is Art”. It is situated in a bustling corridor, a thoroughfare, somewhere on the way to somewhere else. This corridor-setting, in which you really have to work to be able to take the time to engage, could be a draw-back. But I don’t think that the collage would translate as effectively in another context.
Having had to deliberately take time to stay with the collage, to work through pre-conceptions, I now find that I can accept it. Maybe through understanding I can even love it. I can love the impulsivity, the “happening”, the fun. I can love that Madden lets the shapes and space tell her where they want to be. It is a situational, responsive work. You have to fight to take your time with it, let it work on you, give it space… but it is Art.
