
I was very drawn to the ‘buildability’ of Karel Appel’s sculptures—our prompt for The Kick-About No. 154—with structures comprising sandwiches of flat, simple shapes. With no real plan in mind, I set about creating some quick moulds out of Sellotaped belts of acetate, then filled those shapes with some skimming plaster I’d bought in error. The plaster was lovely to work with, and I soon had this chunky set of shapes, which I then glued together to create this semblance of a bird — a dove, maybe?
I then painted the different sections in Appel-inspired colours and gave the whole thing a rich coat of varnish. The resulting sculpture actually sits, unfixed, on its red plinth, which meant I was able to set it rocking while I was photographing it — hence the more impressionistic images that resulted from the pre-Kick-About photoshoot. My effort this week lacks the ‘punk’ of Appel’s more energised sculptures, settling instead for Fisher-Price meets Duplo.



















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