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In our last Kick-About, we found ourselves in the world of Diane Arbus, drawn to her quiet intensity and the way she revealed strangeness within the familiar. This time, our prompt looks to a very different kind of wildness: “Donatello Among the Wild Beasts.” The phrase, first used to describe the explosive arrival of the…
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In addition to Diane Arbus’s richly unsettling ‘Halloween’ images—our prompt for The Kick-About No.143—I’m channelling Nicolas Roeg’s classic film, Don’t Look Now (1973) in these photographs. I enlisted the help of a friend’s 10 year old son to help me stage these images in one of Whitstable’s famous alleyways (which run between its various streets).…
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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…
Red's Kingdom 