Our last Kick-About lingered in the half-light, drawing inspiration from the phrase In Praise of Shadows. This week, our muse is the artist Nnenna Okore, whose tactile, organic sculptures are often shaped from everyday or discarded materials. Her work transforms the ordinary into something alive with texture and movement, evoking cycles of growth, decay and renewal. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time—and for all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
James Randall
“Should have been inspired by this eco weaver but got distracted in texture and more is more until well you just have to stop at some point. There was something about life stages in there…”
Lewis Punton
“My latest Kick-About offering is a classic example of a prompt interacting in real-time with the media that I’ve been engaging with outside of any creative practise, as the work of Nnenna Okore began naturally bonding in my brain with three recent cinema trips (28 Years Later, Weapons, and Together to be more specific) as I started to consider my response.
To achieve this simple yet grotesque collection of images, I threw yarn down in random patters and manipulated them in post until they felt like gritty inserts that Danny Boyle might cut to as a zombie lurched towards some unsuspecting civilian, or perhaps an homage to the very tangible horror featured in Together. Whilst not particularly flashy, I’m really happy with the sense of frantic movement and organic matter that this very DIY project achieves!”
Phil Gomm
“These Okore-inspired images began simply enough as photographs of the caustics at the bottom of a holiday swimming pool. The ‘netting effect’ of the sunlit water on the bottom of the pool put me in mind of Okore’s own fabrics, so I set myself the trial-and-error task of working with these images to produce something interesting. When I look at these resulting images, I see explosions of string or perhaps rubber bands—and cross-sections of geodes too. There’s something pathogenic about some of them, so maybe a touch creepier than rubber bands! Anyway, it was good experimental fun.’
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
Gary Thorne
“N. Okore’s fibre artwork excited me with its displays of colour, organic free-flowing forms, and lack of symmetry. Her creation of a sense of air and movement within the form is echoed in my first piece. My second attempt, however, deviates back to my default of a solid form, though still influenced by her use of asymmetry. The tablemat serves as the base construct upon which the yarn is attached. It seems appropriate to label this piece Hot Taco with Avocado.”
Graeme Daly
“Admiring Okore’s back catalogue of truly impressive work, I had a few ideas for this week’s Kick-About. One idea I wanted to pursue proved too ambitious, so I settled on simply using multicoloured yarn, out of which I fashioned some mandalas.”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.ie
Kerfe Roig
“My sisters-in-law and I started an embroidery project where we would each make a cloth book exploring different stitches. I decided to work with overlapping circles, but mostly all I did was purchase some fabric and make a lot of drawings on paper that I then colored in. Nenna’s art inspired me to start actually embroidering my designs. I didn’t nearly finish this one, but I did enough to show I had gotten the effect I wanted to imitate–open circles with heavy outlines and a delicate ground.“
kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com
Charly Skilling
“Nnenna Olore’s work appealed to me on many levels – colours, textures and textiles, recycled materials and found objects. I found a video of her discussing her piece Spirit of Dance and was drawn to her ideas of placing her work in situations where it was exposed to the elements, and thus altered by them, even if this eventually led to the deterioration and destruction of the piece. So, armed with some old scraps of fabric, a little fabric paint, a few beads, and some twigs and debris from the garden, I set about creating my own mini “installation.”
Next time, our prompt is a small, playful object, defined by rhythm, balance, and the poetry of perpetual motion…
Red's Kingdom 
Leave a comment