Red's Kingdom

Inspired by Donati’s Comet – our prompt for The Kick-About No. 162 – these images evoke the Moon but are in fact photographs of the corroded bowls of a series of metal bird baths from our garden. You’re looking directly down into the metal basins, where sparrows and starlings come to drink and bathe, and where the original red and yellow enamel paint has gradually become worn and patchy. The contrasting tones of the red and yellow enamel produce striking effects when photographed in black and white. I had a hunch that, photographed against black sugar paper, the surfaces might evoke planetary or lunar landscapes.

I’ve titled the series Mare Ferrum (‘Sea of Iron’), an invented Latin name modelled on the names of the Moon’s dark basalt plains—such as Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquillity), Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) and Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity). These names were largely established in the seventeenth century, most notably by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli in his 1651 lunar nomenclature.