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In our last Kick-About, Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus invited us to see identity reshaped through the shifting forms of nature. Now, as autumn deepens and the light grows thinner, our focus turns to Diane Arbus—an artist who found mystery in the everyday and empathy in the overlooked. As always, the works that follow were made in a
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There is a long-running radio programme on the BBC called ‘Just a Minute’, in which contestants are given one minute to talk about a given subject for a minute without repetition or deviation. Fittingly, I was listening to this half-hour programme in the kitchen while pinning a selection of foliage and flowers from the garden
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In our last Kick-About, the spinning top had us thinking about rhythm, motion, and balance. This week, the prompt takes a more fantastical turn with Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus—a portrait of Emperor Rudolf II composed entirely of fruits, flowers, and vegetables. Part play, part provocation, it asks us to see the familiar made strange. As always,
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You’ll laugh when I tell you how I made these images for The Kick-About No,141—at least, my husband laughed when he saw me walking a 4K webcam out of the back door into the garden on a very long extension lead…. and then whirling it around in very fast circles. (Not sure the sparrows were
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These Nnenna Okore-inspired images for The Kick-About No. 140 began simply enough as photographs of the caustics at the bottom of a holiday swimming pool. The ‘netting effect’ of the sunlit water on the bottom of the pool put me in mind of Okore’s own fabrics, so I set myself the trial-and-error task of working
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Our last Kick-About lingered in the half-light, drawing inspiration from the phrase In Praise of Shadows. This week, our muse is the artist Nnenna Okore, whose tactile, organic sculptures are often shaped from everyday or discarded materials. Her work transforms the ordinary into something alive with texture and movement, evoking cycles of growth, decay and
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At the very end of July, I was visited by a small team of creative people from The Modern House—not because my house is ‘modern’ (it’s not), but because they’ve launched a new thread about gardens too. Lifelong gardener and journalist Francine Raymond is leading the series How My Garden Grows and she is exploring
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A few weeks back I was on holiday at a house with a small swimming pool. It was incredibly hot, and the pool was beloved by clouds of thirsty wasps and hornets, so floating about on a lilo was often an act of courage. We had some friends staying with us, and much of our
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I was away in France two weeks ago in an old house that always inspires me to channel my inner ‘spirit photographer’, hoping to create and/or capture some kind of phantasmagoria with my camera. The latest KA prompt saw me thinking about how I could manifest a shadowy apparition in the looking glass of the
Red's Kingdom 