Lights (After Menken) #2 (2021)

The Kick-About No.34, inspired by experimental film-maker, Marie Menken, was all about working directly and playfully, emulating the way Menken had turned her camera on the Christmas lights of New York to transform them into abstract patterns and ‘drawings’. For my part, I fashioned for myself a very simple piece of apparatus – a sheet of glass, painted black, scored with dots and dashes – and set about using it to produce some in-camera lightshows of my own. This second set of images represent a different approach to the previous bunch, with the sheet of painted glass being pivoted away-and-towards the camera, or shoved left-and-right in front of it. In one of the resulting images, the Chrysler Building looks set to materialise…