A second macabre collection of self-portraits from my ‘Portfolio of Horrors’ project, produced in response to The Kick-About No.39. Some of the transformations in this set really make me smile (though that’s not the intended effect on the audience!), because they happened so simply. I don’t know what it says about the specific configuration of my features, but the ‘Count Orlok‘ portrait, with those heavy-lidded eyes and hooked nose, is just my face and nothing more than that. Likewise, the topmost image, which is wonderfully strange, like some stunted, fetal imp, is also just ‘my face’.
The transformations of shadow, aided and abetted by the low-resolution textures of my rubbish webcam, are rather thrilling. They play to that universal childhood experience of discovering how even the most familiar things in our bedrooms can persecute us with their otherness after the lights go out. When I saw the results of the ‘imp’ image, I was strongly reminded of an episode from the 1976 television series, Beasts, about a newly married couple finding some strange dead creature bricked into the walls of their cottage, an idea I promptly nicked for the caption.
Red's Kingdom 