• It was all the way back in November I last caught up with Red’s Kingdom’s artist-in-residence – filmmaker, animator and digital artist, Tom Beg. Since that time, I can assure you Tom hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs. On the contrary, he has been hard at working bringing the illusion of life to the first group…

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  • Phil Cooper / Painting Chimera #13

    There are some very scary things in Chimera, but Chapter 17 takes us to a truly hellish place. Running the gauntlet of the dismantlers is something from our worst nightmares, and Kyp seems to be caught between various horrible ways to die. The idea of being taken apart taps into some very deep seated fears…

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  • Chimera Book 1 / Chapter 17 – The Dismantlers

    And we’re back! It’s time to rejoin Kyp Finnegan, Jamie Bean and Sir Regulus Ferric in the fantastical and perilous realm of Chimera, the world of lost things. It’s been a wee while I know, so listen again to Chapter 16 to remind yourself of all the most recent daring do! Many thanks as always…

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  • Throwback Friday #44 Short Story: Answering Machine (1998 rev. 2021)

    Another short story from the floppy disc archive, prompted by some real world moment of strangeness with an answering machine I can now only just vaguely recall. I realise this effort is something of a period piece, what with its twentieth century trappings – a landline, how quaint! In common with cameras and photographs, I’ve…

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  • Film: Lost In Fields Part 8 – Saxon Shore Scrub, February (2021)

    An eighth film in the Getting Lost In Fields series, a marked departure from the impressionist fantasias of some of my other photographic expeditions into the ambience of particular patches of wild and ostensibly unremarkable local landscapes. The photographs comprising the roomy and doomy tableaux characterising this little moving image piece were taken during the…

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  • MFT #11 The Witch by Shirley Jackson (1949)

    A while back I shared a short essay about our long-standing cultural antipathy for children, evidenced by the sorts of stories we tell ourselves about them. Entitled Tomorrow Belongs To Me, I used Michael Hanaeke’s chilly, ambiguous The White Ribbon (2009) as the entry point into a more broad examination of narratives in which children…

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  • Throwback Friday #43 An Off-Cut (2017)

    When you’re scrambling about in an old dark house trying to produce phantasmagorical effects on film using various Heath Robinson-style contraptions comprising light-sources and black elastic, not everything goes according to plan. My various hard drives are somewhat littered with ‘failures to launch’ – underwhelming photographs featuring unmagical moments. Some of these ‘off-cuts’ are not…

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  • Fox Quick (2021)

    I wanted to engage with the most recent Kick-About prompt – the 5 Canons of Rhetoric – as it related to the idea of moving from an initial instinctive idea to something recognisably cogent and complete, and communicated successfully to others. I chose the pangram, ‘The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog’ because,…

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  • The Kick-About comes of age today, with Edition No. 21. Let me begin by saying how restorative, ordering and genuinely exciting I find our collective runarounds. Through your emails, comments and conversations, I know you value the Kick-About too, seeing it as an opportunity to make some new stuff, finish some older stuff, get something…

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  • Saxon Shore Scrub #4 (2021)

    A final set of photographs from the scrubland at Saxon Shore. I went down into the basin, where the snow was lying thicker, and even though there were people walking their dogs nearby and a line of jolly beach huts just behind me, I knew the strange corrugations of the snow would produce ‘off-world’ spectacles…

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