Both a painter and a ceramicist, Madden has always expressed a powerful sense of the land in his work. The moody West Coast emerges in the earthy qualities of his unglazed ceramics and the dark, rich thickness of his earlier abstract works. Often textured to the point of being sculptural, Madden's abstract canvases have topographies built up from sand and shellac into scored, dense surfaces. More recently, Madden has explored landscape painting, producing boldly expressionistic scenes of wild, muddy hills and grey seas.

Madden is also strongly influenced by the narrative legacy of his Irish coalminer father. A 2003 exhibition entitled Black Truth explored, through a series of expressive, immediate oil paintings, the dark, grimy underground history of the coal mines, the convivial everyday life, the quiet strengths and human tragedies of the miners. However, as Mette Hansen notes, the coal mines are also visible in the burnished metals and corroded minerals of his abstract paintings, glimmering through fissures in their charcoal surfaces like "the miner's lamp as it briefly illuminates the dark wall".