In our last Kick-About, simple geometric shapes were set in motion, proving just how much could be achieved with the simplest of forms. This week, we move back into three dimensions with the work of Lee Bontecou, whose sculptures sit somewhere between drawing, sculpture, and engineering. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time. For all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
Francesca Maxwell
“Thank you for introducing me to this amazing artist. I love all her work. I had to try do something following her forms but, of course, in my more painterly style. Here it is: acrylic inks on watercolour paper.”
Graeme Daly
“What a brilliant artist Lee Bontecou is! I love how she bridges the gap between beauty and horror. I had planned to take these drawings further by transforming them into 3D forms and surrounding them with panels, much like Bontecou’s welded pieces. However, my Maya licence expired, so I did what I could, drawing inspiration from Bontecou’s soot drawings and that stunning, mind-blowing mobile-like sculpture.”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.ie
Phil Gomm
“My immediate association with Bontecou’s sculptures and drawings was the kind of speculative, temporary architecture you see at world expos, like the 1951 Festival of Britain. I was thinking about masts, tensile structures, and suspended orbs — pavilions showcasing “the modern”. With this in mind, I set about kit-bashing an architectural maquette: a globe cast in plaster from a mould derived from the top of a two-litre water bottle, cork balls, bendy jeweller’s pins, a cork placemat, and some silver thread.”
“With the maquette made — with no thought given to scale — I wanted to include some people, but the ones I had were too big. I wondered if this might be a useful application for generative AI, so I uploaded one of my photographs and prompted for the inclusion of some architectural modeller’s figures. I asked that the figures look like mass-produced ones, so a little wobbly in places. The results of that prompt are below. The maquette itself is unchanged.“
“I’d always imagined my ‘Bontecou Pavilion’ as an illuminated structure; it has this celestial feeling, so I experimented again to see if I could prompt my architectural model to be lit as an architectural model might be — with LEDs, stem-like structures topped with lights, and orbs glowing from within like moons. The ability to art-direct these maquette photos post-shoot was exciting.”
“Finally, given my original inspiration for the architectural maquette, I was curious to see if I could complete the logic of this Kick-About by situating my Bontecou Pavilion in the environs of the Festival of Britain itself. The images below are AI-generated, obviously, after working with the tool to establish the materiality of the pavilion as a ‘real installation’ in a ‘real’ timeframe. The ability to move from a hands-on maquette built from found objects to this never-never land was pretty satisfying. This is the first time I’ve used AI in this additive way, and while I appreciate there is ambivalence about its use and abuse, this direct editing-into-my-photographs workflow reminded me of the early days of digital retouching in Photoshop.”
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
James Randall
“Lee Bontecou’s interest in technology and her velvet-lined voids triggered a response from me to our current technological pivot point and fears about AI. In my case, the velvet-lined void was replaced by the evil void of the mobile screen: a not-so-cheery Siri. Response two was just the start of an abstraction from image one.”
Charly Skilling
“I haven’t done much ‘making’ like this since the kids were at playschool, but I found some plastic pots, balls, and some sticky-backed felt, and spent a hot, sticky afternoon playing about with them until I had made something I liked.”
Next time, our prompt looks skywards, inspired by a remarkable nineteenth-century image that captures both scientific observation and a sense of wonder.
Red's Kingdom 
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