Red's Kingdom

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Our previous Kick-About had a touch of spookiness about it; this week, it’s less spook more sparkle, as we cast our eyes skywards to catch a falling star or two… Enjoy this latest collection of new works made in a short time, and be sure to browse all previous editions of this fortnightly creative challenge here.

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Francesca Maxwell

“Here is my contribution for the Perseids just as I listen to the bangs and booms outside. I envisaged different starburst and explosions—as they happen, and the aftermath as well.”

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www.FBM.me.uk

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Tom Beg

“My approach was pretty straightforward: meteor showers look cool, so I just made a bunch of scenes with loads of meteors to amp up the effect.”

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twitter.com/earthlystranger / vimeo.com/tombeg / tombeg.com

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Tony Reeves

I’ve always been fascinated by space. Everything about it. It all started when my dad gave me a science fiction book aged about 10, and since then I’ve rarely read a book in a different genre. Space invokes a feeling of calmness and serenity in me, and it has always influenced the music I’ve written. So it was an absolute joy to write this track in response to The Perseids prompt

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James Randall

“This interesting prompt got me thinking about comets moving through space mixing the great cosmic stew. Phil has already taken us out to infinity and beyond and I felt this was an extension of the Hubble adventure. I was originally trying to put a human spin on it then it became less specific to the point where objects could begin to disintegrate (my pic didn’t get there.) Comparisons with viruses and smells moving through air began to arise—this prompt became about attraction. Could have gone further.“

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Jan Blake

“I have seen many shooting stars when on a beach in summer in southern France. However, I don’t think I have ever seen a meteor shower so I can only go on what I imagine a bursting forth of so much energy might be. I have been working on this piece for some while. With a little manipulation in the computer it seemed to answer my reading of the prompt—as a feeling of dispersal into a wider sphere.”

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janblake.co.uk

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Marion Raper

“I have never managed to see the Perseids meteor shower—just like I have never seen the Northern lights which some people saw locally for the first time. Anything to do with space blows my mind. It’s just beyond comprehension. Here are some imagined Hubble Telescope views of the cosmos (using my new marbling paints!).”

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Phil Gomm

“These long-exposure images were originally produced ‘in-camera’—with a table-top covered in black dustbin sacks and a strip of mains-powered LED-lights. The blurs and distortions were produced by photographing through some thick glass tumblers. The curvature of the planet surface was then produced digitally—just by grabbing the horizon line and giving it a good yank. My inspiration for these photographs comes from the 1950s science-fiction classic This Island Earth (1955), a film I watched many times when I was a kid. The film features a planet being bombarded throughout by meteors and it has this fun, queasy colour-palette, which I wanted to emulate in my images by first making them black and white, and then colourising them afterwards. Ultimately, I was imagining these photographs as lobby-card stills, or film posters, for some forgotten sci-fi classic.”

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philgomm.com

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Kerfe Roig

“You can never paint too many cosmic circles...”

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to hear the earth speak

to split into rings–
doubled, paralleled, exposed
and then multiplied
to evaporate—
shining, crystallized, light-strewn,
horizon-scattered
to be lost, unknown,
uncontained, unexpected
and accidental
to disorder time,
replacing the absurd with
the impossible
to converge unmasked,
shape-shifting into stillness,
disintegrated
to be strange like stars–
complete, inexplicable,
symbolic, complex

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kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com

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And, with kind thanks to James Randall for the heads-up… our next prompt presents the computer-game-inspired textiles of Melissa Cody.

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