Verglas #1 (2021)

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Although the weather has turned much colder here in the UK, it’s not yet cold enough here in Whitstable for any shows of ice or snow. With Andy Goldsworthy’s land art piece Ice Spiral as the prompt for this week’s Kick-About No. 42, I knew I’d be out of luck if I was hoping to catch any ready-made installations out in the wilds.

No matter, as off into the garden I went, looking for interesting seed heads and any flashes of remaining colour, before pulling out some handy Tuppaware and a big Pyrex dish, filling them with water, then entombing my finds from the garden in ice, courtesy of the bottom drawer of the freezer.

Once released from their ad-hoc moulds, I then moved quickly to photograph the resulting artefacts, squizzing with pleasure at their magical displays of colour, light and translucency – while all the time mopping up the pools of melt water with an old dishcloth.

There’s an obvious ‘glass paperweight’ quality to these images (which I always loved as a child), a sort of 1970’s crafting vibe too. Some of the more abstracted images I went on to produce from these same blocks of ice take things in a more impressionist, less object-bound direction. I’ll be sharing these over the coming days.

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