Will Maddrell

Exactly, the sea was almost always in sight, and even if it wasn’t, I was never too far from a glen with rivers and waterfalls. Going swimming played a big part too, and my childhood was spent mostly in a pool, training or competing, until I was 16. Despite my fire sign Saggitarius, everything points to water.
My favourite classes at university were probably a module on oceanic images. They had a real impact on me. Even though we studied these concepts within the context of Chile, many ideas about the cultural and philosophical implications of water, as explored by Romain Rolland, Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Vicuña, Hester Blum, Pablo Neruda, seemed quite familiar when I thought about my own experiences. Thinking about life and the world as interconnected, full of change, awe, ego deaths and a constant search for freedom somehow felt very natural to me.
When it came to accepting that I was an artist (beforehand I’d tried a number of jobs in an attempt to feel more adult, respectable, sensible, like I knew what I was doing), some of the very first images I made in London depicted water. Water not only reflects my own life, playing as a child or thinking with my serious-student hat, but its visual vocabulary follows me into painting. This show is ultimately about letting go of control as much as the nature of cultural production, and in water, when you’re soaking wet, it seems like the perfect place to find freedom and generate new ideas. It’s like the epiphanies you get in the shower, except these ideas I can take seriously.

I’ve definitely challenged my ideas from last year’s show, technically as much as conceptually, and pushed them further in this exhibition and in my wider practice. But it’s true that water, to some extent, is integral to the images I’m making. I still have much more to develop with it.
What I’ve labelled as the soaking wet is about being open to change, surrender, and ego death, just like the feeling of being caught in the rain, or in a dimly-lit room of sweaty, dancing bodies. On a bigger scale, this way of thinking helps me understand that what can feel rigid and fixed in life — time, romantic and professional relationships, brands, nations, systems of power, versions of ourselves, a never-ending shift at work — is really just an illusion, or an inclination to cling to what feels familiar and secure. Everything is far more ephemeral than we’re led to believe. And imagining a serious character being serious in their serious job, soaked through, giving up control, letting go, it feels very fun and silly.

Art and culture production are as much products of labour as much as they are about personal fulfilment, emotional release, intellectual breakthroughs, and for an artist, their work often stems, even if indirectly, from lived experience.
In early human societies, art likely emerged organically from daily life, including activities like frolicking in fields, storytelling, and communal rituals. Without formal divisions between work and leisure, creative expression was intertwined with survival, play, and social bonding. Art, in this context, was not a separate, professionalised endeavour but a natural extension of human interaction with the environment, the body, and each other, dancing, singing, and painting.
Nowadays, we can’t even assume that the people involved in making the art and culture are doing so with only pleasure in mind. It is often their means to survival in more ways than one. I’m interested in this weird, contradictory yet interdependent relationship of work and pleasure. Some of my favourite art feels lived in, like someone was there, with real ideas and real feelings, and that seems only possible when the artist allows themself to live.

Like any good residency, General Assembly’s was intended to offer artists, whose weeks are often packed with part- or full-time work before they even get to the studio, the time and space for rest and relaxation as much as creative development. If you don’t come from money or have a sugar daddy, living as an artist in London is near impossible. It is sometimes near masochistic, but I’m compelled to make art, or let my ego die trying. Doing it in a different context, in an idyllic setting like rural France, felt like an interesting experience that was hard to say no to. It felt like I was taking an annual leave allowance, while also satisfying an urge to be creatively productive.
With Mia Graham, another painter on the residency, we had no set agenda to explore anywhere in particular, which was a nice contrast to the action-packed nature of living in London. The house where we stayed has a beautiful garden and is near a river, so we spent a lot of time outside, playing with the dog and cats, and swimming. I think the local people were confused to see me dressed up in costume and floating around the river. We also explored the aisles at Carrefour supermarket.

Reading about the history of the region, it seemed like other artists have had similar ideas of rest and, over the centuries, have spent time making work of some kind there. Da Vinci, Balzac, Max Ernst and Rodin, they were mostly in search of a tranquil environment conducive to creativity. But I’m definitely not an old master in the way we might label these men. I’m only 26. I thought it would be interesting to poke fun at the old master archetype, whose developed life affords them a kind of wisdom, as if they are doing something right, who supposedly, with their mastery, know how to live life.
I hope to go back one day and visit the Château du Clos Lucé, where Da Vinci made his final works, the house and studio Ernst and Dorothea Tanning established, and also the Château de Chinon, where Joan of Arc was granted an audience and described publicly the heavenly voices she’d heard. I do wonder if it was raining when she heard them.

Very autobiographical. I wanted to say things I didn’t feel like I could say directly, while also adding a light-heartedness to the show. The medium is the message, and it was great to contribute to an exhibition text, which is often reserved for a serious analysis of the works.
I found it really hard to slow down in the first few days of the residency. Too much cortisol, as if I’d never left my busy life in London. In a fictional parallel, it felt like the only way I could get this character to rest was to see her have an accident or be jolted spiritually in some way. A summer romance wouldn't have slowed her down, as the dating apps don’t really give there, and it’s very rural, plus, ironically, she was too busy painting and trying to be masterful. Of course, everything is soaking wet in the universe of my paintings, so inevitably it was a matter of time before she’d slip and fall into the river. Poor thing. Making up stories, like making paintings, is often a way for me to manifest what I want or what I’m thinking about. If words are spells (spelling), then painting is the vision board and original virtual reality. See: “Barbie as Rapunzel” and what happens with her paintbrush.

I’ve spent a lot of time observing what things look like after it’s been raining. If you see a random person looking for too long at a puddle, it’s probably me. Lighting is often slightly darker, and the wetness makes everything appear far more saturated, with small moments of intense highlights. I’m trying to reinterpret this in my paintings in order to make serious or orderly scenes feel temporary, dilutable, dissolvable, or full of colour like spilt petrol on the pavement, full of energy and possibility for change.

The painting you refer to, Hue of Reality, and Cadmium Fiction (Buckets of Water/Paint), was made with one of the larger paintings in the show in mind, Old Master Performance Artists Throwing Buckets of Water/Paint at One Another. I was thinking about choreographer Pina Bausch’s Vollmond, where we see dancers splashing around on stage and throwing buckets of water at each other. It was interesting to think about what it might be like if this water was replaced by paint, and how playing in water is a chance to make meaning in the same way that a painter tries to with paint. The tins of wall paint feel larger scale, more industrious, and more related to productivity, where tubes of oil paint might relate more readily to leisure. I’m a diehard fan of oil paints. I wanted to marry ideas of pleasure and letting go with their opposites, so the outcome feels like something related to reinvention and self-discovery.

It’s very common now for younger artists to be involved in the production of art objects for more established artists, who might risk becoming more like creative directors of their art practice, their brand. Assistants are involved to varying degrees, but ultimately help to bring a vision to life, from stretching canvas and maintaining a studio, to preparing works for the artist’s final touches, or producing the whole thing. It can be a weird experience, especially when it comes to issues of authorship and the mechanics of cultural output, and it’s often not spoken about directly. None of these conversations are new, however.

Assistants have been employed since ancient times. Particularly during the Renaissance, we have examples of assistants or apprentices helping master artists with ambitious, complex and detailed works, the master artist running a structured atelier. The difference with more recent times is that artistic production is far less standardised, and the artist’s own subjectivity takes centre stage. All this to say that perhaps the art world could learn something from adjacent industries, like film, TV, music and fashion, where it is far more common to acknowledge collaborators. This is especially important for artists who employ literal factories of young assistants, or who outsource their production to other parts of the world on the cheap. We can’t just use Warhol’s iteration of the factory as justification to disguise the means to production. For me, at least, I’ve been able to knock off a large chunk of the ten thousand hours they say you need to become a master at something. So, nothing is lost.

I try to carry this same self-critical approach into the development of my own practice and make work about the tools and conditions with and under which something is made. Using my image as a raw material, I develop characters, their life stories, what they wear, how they feel, their interests. I often design sets in my studio, even if very DIY, to stage lighting. It often feels like everything in life is made up, so it’s helpful to poke fun at the ways we produce and repeat narratives, truths and lies to different levels of intensity and different audiences.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a boy or girl, man or woman. I’ve felt very poor and very rich, experienced varying degrees of class identity, have for one week partied a stone’s throw from Lindsay Lohan in Mykonos, and a few days later stacked the shelves of a supermarket. There are many experiences that will never be mine, and they are not for me to tell, but I am fascinated to presume, as Zadie Smith would encourage. The nature of sociocultural production as a whole provides the means to understand all kinds of expression.

Our preoccupation with celebrity is quite a daunting prospect. Artists become content creators, focussed on creating content for the algorithms, rather than making the art independently of it at first. Some make art that performs well on social media or about social media itself as a way to get around this problem. One of the reasons why artists create alter egos and pseudonyms is a way to separate celebrity persona from their real selves or do something they couldn’t do without the safe space of a fiction.
But observing the way celebrity takes shape, the ways PRs and the media construct a narrative, it’s great material for my work. And sometimes you need to live something out for yourself to really understand it. While celebrity is mostly a mechanism to get career recognition or reach commercial success, it can also tell us something about a very human desire to feel seen, validated and loved.

In my short life so far, I’ve been interested in people who lean into or talk about their celebrity directly, like Lady Gaga, or Lana Del Rey, or who just enjoy the magic of glamour, like the Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2. That’s quite gay of me. My guilty pleasure is The Real Housewives franchise, particularly Beverly Hills, New York, and Salt Lake City. There is something about these women with big lives living out big dreams in a constructed-and-not-really-reality storyline that is so amazing. My favourite form of celebrity is one which feels camp, deliberately exaggerated and theatrical, so that it speaks to an aspect in each of us that is highly recognisable and satirised. Men with celebrity often seem to take themselves too seriously and are less likely to lay bare their vulnerabilities.

Yes, totally. The best painting is honest painting. Even though I might illustrate a made-up reality to talk about the truth, I always try to speak to something real and genuine. I am very single so the painting at the moment is in some ways a means for simulating vulnerability with my own feelings, which inevitably is helpful when it comes to relating to others, and not always romantically.
All the characters in my work of late use my own image, not in a narcissistic way, but as a raw material and one that I can easily manipulate to play a character or construct a different energy in a painting. All painting is also somewhat a self-portrait anyway, because it reflects back to you your way of seeing things, or what you think is good or bad.
Some paintings in the show speak to intimacy and connection more directly, like Old Master Performance Artists Throwing Buckets of Water/Paint at One Another. Both characters are modelled by me with some Photoshop. I hint at a summer romance at the end of the story, and in this painting, because I want to imagine what it might feel and look like and play those characters who do intimacy and vulnerability so well. I find it quite difficult in my day-to-day life.
Making marks with a paintbrush often feels like a stream of consciousness. Even the lesser, minor strokes accumulate into something substantial and revealing. And any reference images or plan is filtered through the painter’s hand. Single painterly gestures amount to visual patterns and the bigger picture, in the same way that daily habits amount to established psychological behaviours, individually and collectively. Repeated actions, whether making marks on a canvas or taking small, perhaps seemingly insignificant actions in a life, have a lot to tell us about how we go about living. In the context of relationships, and in the context of making paintings about relationships, the behaviours we exhibit time and time again show us much about how we frame ourselves, take action in the world and our capacity to be courageous. Being honest and intimate is very risky, but it’s what makes art worth making and life worth living because it’s where true connection is found.

To take my mum’s advice and learn not to wait for the storm to pass, but to dance in the rain. Learn to rest, to love again, have a few more ego deaths, then back to painting.