Madonna Reliquary Urn. 1998.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to Madonna’s music and watching her videos on TV and I thought it would be interesting to make a reliquary urn about her based upon my own thoughts about her. This was the second urn that I made in the third year of the BA (Hons) Ceramics Degree course.
For me clay is the ideal medium to do this as it can be easily manipulated more than any other material into the shape and form that I wanted. Also clay has a long tradition of being decorated in an un-ceramic like manner, denying the traditional possibilities of clay, so that it can appear to look like other materials. This can create ambiguity and it was that ambiguity that I wanted to use to say something I felt about her, a female displaying feminine but mostly masculine qualities. So the urn’s overall aggressively masculine sharp hard edge sexual stance is contradicted or perhaps balanced by, the overly large voluptuous lips, the jewellery, the bright colours, the beauty spot, the stockings and suspenders, the large curvaceous exposed breasts but with hard riveted masculine like nipples, all to express that aforementioned ambivalent quality.
For me Madonna also embodies a curious mix of the spiritual and blatant earthy sexuality. As a boy one of the things that I found fascinating were chimney pots, my grandparents had some in their back garden used as ornaments, so I used the shape of a Victorian chimney pot, turned the shape upside down, cut one side out, to create a three sided body for the urn and used that three sidedness to represent the spirit, soul and body. The urn sits upon a plinth which grounds it to the earth whilst at the same time it is a launch pad for the journey to heaven, with the finger pointing heavenwards to the spiritual dimension. The finger and the breasts form the urn’s lid. The small crosses are emblematic of her Catholic upbringing and are seen above the silvered pubic hair which is a reference to Monroe, who has been one of the inspirations for Madonna. The artist Andy Warhol depicted Monroe using bright colours in a Pop Art way and by using combinations of primary and secondary colours, another link is established to Monroe, linking also to Pop Art and popular culture. I could never have done this by using a traditional ceramic finish.
For this piece of visual culture my aim was also to make the viewer smile and at the same time to realise that earthly life is transitory and to think about what happens afterwards.