After Asawa #3 (2023)

A final set of Ruth Asawa-inspired photographs produced in advance of The Kick-About No.74, wherein simple cones of ruled transparent acetate give rise to delicate shell-like impressions.

Les miroirs (2023)

What really resonated with me in regards to Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (our latest Kick-About prompt) is how ‘meta’ this painting is, in so much as it is a painting about painting. Las Meninas deconstructs itself by signposting its own artificiality and constructedness. For me, it produces a keen mise-en-abyme effect, as one constructed reality reflects another construction, with surfaces reflecting other surfaces in plain acknowledgment of illusion and artifice. It just feels very playful to me, so with that in mind, I set about bringing together as many reflective surfaces in one space as possible to play a few games of my own.

Glove #3 (2022)

Inspired by the soundsuits of the artist Nick Cave, and produced for The Kick-About No.64, a few more photographs with a dancing ‘glove puppet’ as their subject.

Glove #2 (2022)

Produced in response to the dancing soundsuits of the artist Nick Cave – our inspiration for The Kick-About No.64 – another set of images, the subject of which is, perhaps improbably, an ad-hoc dancing glove puppet…

Grasses After Lamplough #3 (2022)

A final set of Lamplough-inspired golden-hour grasses.

For Drummers Only #7 (2022)

A last hurrah courtesy of The Kick-About No.56 and Sandy Nelson’s percussive powers. My unrequited print and textile brain insists I do something with some of these images (“To the loom with you at once!“), but I lack the skills, stuff and wherewithal to act on these impulses!

Insert Shape (After Matisse) #5 (2021)

The final few images coming at the end of my splurge of activity in response to The Kick-About No.38 – dense layerings of Powerpoint-originated shapes brought together in Photoshop to produce some impressionistic effects.

Insert Shape (After Matisse) #4 (2021)

A fourth collection of abstract compositions with their provenance in the cookie-cutter toolsets of Powerpoint, inspired by Matisse’s use of scissors and paper and produced as part of my response to The Kick-About No.38. Again, I found myself rather enamoured by the vintage-vibes coming off some of these examples, that sense of something ‘modern’ being dreamed up by a mid-20th Century imagination. I look at these and wish I had the reserves to explore them as large-scale prints on expensive papers, or as textiles, or as floor-plans for rather wondrous ‘futuristic’ architecture.

Insert Shape (After Matisse) #3 (2021)

A third set of images produced between Powerpoint and Photoshop, produced by way of a response to the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, this week’s Kick-About prompt. Something pleasingly opalescent getting started in some of these layerings, but reminded too of satellite images, and mid-century modern textiles and wall-coverings.

Insert Shape (After Matisse) #2 (2021)

More images produced as part of my response to The Kick-About No.38, which took the cut-outs of Henri Matisse as its prompt, and more images resulting from an improbably happy marriage between Powerpoint and Photoshop. In contrast to the these previous images, I enlisted one of Powerpoints ‘ready-mades’ – an off-the-peg icon of some seaweed with some passing resemblance to some of Matisse’s own plant forms. Different visual chemistry this time around, with the layerings resulting in mosaical effects, putting me in mind of Gaudi.