Red's Kingdom

More tiny, table-top sculptures inspired by Giacometti’s strange, attenuated figures—our muse for The Kick-About No.159—I had half a packet of mass-produced vinyl heads I’d sourced for this Kick-About project, and one of them was stuck on top of a pencil in my jam jar of pens by my desk. I dug out some of the wooden cutlery left over from this Kick-About project and pushed their handles into the vinyl heads. That done, I then mixed up a deep yoghurt pot’s worth of plaster and dripped the heads-on-sticks like coating toffee-apples. When they were dry, I stuck the business end of the cutlery into bases made of air-drying clay, so the figures could stand up. I dipped the bottom halves of the figures in more plaster, and repeated the process at both ends until I had them coated. When they were dry, I used some stove paint to change their appearance from plaster to metal, and then went about applying various paint finishes to produce the approximation of bronzes. There were five figures originally, but I broke one while being a bit over-zealous with the palms of my hands (which I was using instead of paint brushes to produce the patina).

The shape of the figures’ heads remind me of the seed heads of poppies, which share that flattened shape and pronounced ridge (called a stigmatic disc apparently). As these figures share the monk-like vibe of their kit-bashed forbears, I’m naming them ‘Stigmatics’.