Our last Kick-About took us into the ossuary, where human remains are gathered and arranged. This week, we turn to Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), in which the fragments of a detonated garden shed hang suspended in mid-air. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time — and for all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
Gary Thorne
“Whether you intentionally blow something up, look simply for milder forms of destruction, or consider human interaction altering face value, the end result produces ways to look afresh. Wandering Chichester’s side streets this week, these gems fit nicely with our prompt, satisfying me through their naive simplicity. In addition, from the studio, comes this painting, maybe as puzzling as Cornelia Parker’s shed.”
Francesca Maxwell
“I have a couple of paintings that I have done to represent exploding forces, breaking off and expanding, losing the original shape in the process but creating another one that is more dynamic. I love this artist and her process is extraordinary, although the effect is not as powerful with just paint as it is in her three-dimensional artwork.”
James Randall
“Just a quickie again. Cornelia blew it up so I tried to repurpose the blown-up bits.”
Kerfe Roig
“I took some of my shadow photos and layered them in Photoshop with different levels of transparency, since the shadows seemed to me as important as the structure itself.”
Phil Gomm
“After wrestling with a short story for the last Kick-About, there was something welcome about the immediacy of my response to Cornelia Parker’s exploded shed. I went to our own shed and rooted out some chunks of BBQ charcoal—my ‘dark matter’—and then I placed them on some textured paper. That done, I went to the toolbox under the stairs and retrieved a big old rubberised mallet. Maybe you can guess the rest. I photographed the resulting debris fields. On close inspection, the photographs are rich in dynamism and detail. Boom!”
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
Tom Beg
“An attempt at creating some of my own cold dark visual chaos.”
For our next Kick-About, we turn our attention to patterns, fabrics and the surprising stories behind familiar materials.
Leave a Reply