Red's Kingdom

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Back when I did my Foundation in Art and Design at the Amersham and Wycombe College in 1993, my final project was, on reflection, a fanboy’s love letter to the science-fiction Alien franchise and a manifestation of my then-ambition to work in the movies. 

This ‘Black Widow’ encompassed a whole bunch of making techniques, everything from carved polystyrene for the widow’s waspish head-piece, to wrangling the workshop’s mig-welder to fashion the big round hoops for her abdomen. Her articulated legs were all black-smithed from steel rod and her body was covered in all these lovingly-created blisters, fashioned from latex and PVA glue. Such fun. She was this massive black-and-purple monster and I had a lovely time making her over a period of ten sunny weeks.

When I completed the course, the college then inherited the widow and stored her out in the quadrangle, tucked into an alcove – where she remained, until I was contacted 6 years later to be told the Widow was going to be junked finally. So it was I returned to the campus with my 35mm camera and took these photographs for purposes of posterity. She hadn’t fared too badly – a bit flaky here and there, but nothing had dropped off!

Looking at these images now, I approve of how unselfconscious I must have been back then – bloody well just making a monster and in that way pushing into existence the sort of things my imagination was always showing me (though I think some people wished I was more sophisticated at the time!). The truth is, I haven’t really changed that much. I just wish I still had access to that mig-welder…

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