Red's Kingdom

This week’s Kick-About was catalysed by the gorgeous and characterful artwork of Atsuko Tanaka, which had me popping off the lids on those tiny pots of enamel paint and pouring some Tanaka-inspired pools and puddles onto some thick acrylic sheet.

After that, I wanted to somehow three-dimensionalise these blobs, because I was imagining Tanaka’s artworks as molecules in a space. I took some of my photographs into film editing software and worked with them to ‘bend’ the photographs into floating forms. I quickly got this sense of them as floating deep down in the dark of some plankton-rich trench, so I introduced some ‘silt’ or particles-in-suspension to produce a bit more dynamism. Once again, I could feel my previous life working on an animation degree surfacing, as my ‘blobs’ began to anthropomorphise into jolly Pixar things, likely communicating with one another, ‘Clangers-style’...