Hannah 2009

2009

Hannah Madden’s hair is as pure white as driven snow. At fifty-one she should still have some of her mollassen locks left: have the pepper-and-salt look, or perhaps be having regular slices of dye put through her long, strong hair shafts, to keep the grey at bay. But the events of her life have taken their toll, and the hair is unremittingly, almost blindingly, white.

It rather suits her though. For Hannah is an utterly beautiful woman and her beauty is of the kind that just gets better with age. Her white hair is entirely fitting. Hannah is tall and thin. No, not thin in an angular underfed way, but rather slender in a boyish way. She has never had a bust to speak of (only when feeding her four babies did she ever feel the need to wear a bra), never had a wasp-thin waist and never had child-bearing hips. She was never, in other words, the classic hour-glass figure. As a kid she was regularly taken for a boy, a mistake aided and abetted by hair kept shorn by her severe mother.

“I don’t have time to brush and plait all these heads every morning” Mother, swathing her baby boy in a Shetland shawl, had announced to her brood of six girls, “so you, you and you come here, we’ll keep yours short”, she’d popped the baby into the depths of the old pram, brandished her sharpest kitchen scissors in the direction of the back garden and out they had trooped. This, like all Mother’s declarations, had been final. Hannah had been one of the three seemingly randomly picked to have short hair. It affected her whole childhood: disdain from other girls who could toss their gorgeous tresses at her, upset at not being chosen for the part of Mary each Christmas, mortification at remaining among the wallflowers passed over by pimply teenage boys at the school discos. At sixteen she had finally rebelled and refused to have her hair shorn and within months the stuff had veritably sprouted (years of cutting had made it strong and determined) into a mollassen mass of untameable curls. She felt like the Ugly Duckling character: transformed as she was into a breathtaking beauty.

Hannah Madden is a sculptor. A renowned artist. She mainly sculpts heads and mainly in clay, although she has done torsos and whole bodies and she has worked with bronze castings and with stone in the past. Hannah does human heads and also the heads of animals other than humans. She’s especially good at horses and dogs and these are the works that form her bread and butter income, although her fame comes mainly from the heads of famous humans. 

This career of hers did not develop through the expected channel of school art classes followed by Art College then setting up a studio, putting on exhibitions and so on. No. Hannah began her life-long love affair with sculpture through boredom whilst looking after her first boy-friend’s art gallery while he went out “on business” which meant he had long lunches with rich Americans who might buy some of his exhibited works. While Roddy was out, Hannah would contemplate the trendy, alternative works of art in the shop and, more often than not, think, “I could do that”. She started to play around with paper maché in the back of the shop, with interesting results. Much to Roddy’s horror one of his prized Americans bought a few of her pieces, and gave Hannah and intent look and said, “You should work in clay, darling”.

But working with clay was harder to organize. Clay required a kiln and dedicated space, neither of which Hannah had. So for many years she kept working in paper maché – it was so versatile and cheap and could just be done at the kitchen table and cleaned up afterwards like a baking session. 

Hannah and Roddy married in 1977, a year after they had met – on the blue-sky-July morning of her nineteenth birthday – and set up home in a quaint double-upper down by the river in Stockbridge. Over the following four years they filled that little house with four little girls. First came Edith (forever known as Eadie) then Ursula and Martha arrived together and finally Beth showed up. 

Through all of this procreation and the subsequent years of nurture, Hannah kept up her little sideline of creating art out of paper, flour and water. Over time she added the use of wire to her creations, which meant she could make bigger, more structured, pieces. Once made and dried she would paint or enamel the object and sometimes further embellish them with glued on beads or feathers or shells. Gift shops and quirkier art galleries began to take her work and it sold well. By the time the girls were in their teens Hannah was working flat out to keep her outlets supplied.

And then…and then. What triggered it Hannah would never know, but she still blames herself for it today. She feels as if she must have taken her eye off the ball, so to speak, at a crucial moment. At fourteen Eadie was a gorgeous glow of healthy exuberance, an image of her mother, lithe and tawny eyed and wild haired. By fifteen Eadie was a shadow. Her face was thin, cheeks concave, hair dull and lank and her limbs were veritable matchsticks. She was a Lowrie figure. One day Hannah looked up from the paper maché dog she was putting together and saw a ghost: the ghost of her erstwhile happy and healthy eldest daughter. With a jolt she realized that Eadie was ill.

Eadie was diagnosed as anorexic. The ensuing eight years were a turmoil of hospitals, psychiatrists, diets, therapies, mother-daughter workshops, ups and downs, love and hatred, hugs and tears. That dog was to remain an unfinished masterpiece for ever (Hannah still has it in her workshop) and nothing more was made for a decade. Beth, Ursula and Martha looked on in horror as their big sister faded away, but rallied to the cause and took on cooking and housework and self-organisation as ducks take to water – thank goodness. For at some point in the early stages of this tragedy Roddy had taken himself off to the other end of town and set up home there with an up and coming, male, oil painter. To be honest Hannah barely noticed his departure, so bound up with Eadie was she.

Eadie eventually found her way out of her mental turmoil with the help of a tub of paracetamol. She left a scrap of paper simply saying, “enough”, and was gone. At her death she was 23 years old, five foot nine tall and weighed less than five stone.

Hannah Madden is a sculptor of national renown. Hannah Madden is a beautiful, willow tree of a woman, with unusually pure white hair and a sorrow weighing in her eyes as it weighs down the limbs of those beautiful trees. But she is not unhappy these days. She loves her work with passion. She lives alone in a sparsely furnished top floor flat overlooking the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. She has workshop space with a bunch of other artists in a big old brick building in Stockbridge. She sees her three living daughters on a regular basis. In fact she’s off on the overnight sleeper train to London tonight to spend Christmas with them all in Beth’s home in Kent.

With regard to Eadie’s short life and anguished death, Hannah has come to a place of peace with herself.

©Julia Welstead