• Lights (After Menken) #4 (2021)

    More in-camera experimentation deriving from this same hands-on technique and produced in response to The Kick-About No.34. More than anything, this set of photographs recalls the deadly beauty of the lionfish and the deep-water undulations of their spines.

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  • Artist-In-Residence: Graeme Daly #6

    It’s been rather too long since artist-in-residence, Graeme Daly, and I sat down for a proper blether about his continuing adventures as a freelancer, film-maker and photographer. I keep up with Graeme’s various creative endeavours via his Gentle Giant blog and Twitter feed, but nothing tops an old-fashioned chinwag…

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  • Lights (After Menken) #3 (2021)

    A third set of photographs produced in this same way, with contrasting results, inspired by Marie Menken’s 1966 film, Lights. It’s likely there’s a discrepancy between a person’s interest in looking at these images and my fascination with having created them. All I can say about that is… sorry, there’s many more to come, and…

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  • Lights (After Menken) #2 (2021)

    The Kick-About No.34, inspired by experimental film-maker, Marie Menken, was all about working directly and playfully, emulating the way Menken had turned her camera on the Christmas lights of New York to transform them into abstract patterns and ‘drawings’. For my part, I fashioned for myself a very simple piece of apparatus – a sheet…

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  • Throwback Friday #69 Attic (2003)

    Two ‘selfies’ taken at a particular time in a particular place. The attic in question is the attic of my grandmother’s house and I lived up there for a few months while I redecorated her house. My grandmother had died fifteen or so months earlier, and I had the bitter-sweet job of making-over her various…

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  • Phil Cooper / Painting Chimera #15

    After the more reflective mood and quiet menace in the previous instalment, things couldn’t be more different in chapter 19, as Kyp and pals emerge into a scene of carnage and destruction. It’s been a strange exercise this week, smashing up the Temple of Miscellany I constructed earlier in the book. But there’s not much…

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  • Lights (After Menken) #1 (2021)

    There is something so emancipating about Menken’s experimental short film, Lights – the prompt for The Kick-About #35. It expresses a sort of child-like wonder in the way in which the camera transforms what it sees – municipal Christmas decorations into streaking discs of glowing colour and traffic into living electrified scribbles. You get a…

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  • The Kick-About #34 ‘Menken’s Lights’

    How do you follow a dancing chicken? This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, I know, but after the previous Kick-About’s riffing on a theme of performing poultry, where next for our fearless community of creatives? Fortunately, we have Marie Menken’s Lights to illuminate the workings of our respective imaginations, as this week…

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  • Tin Toy #6 (2021)

    Tin Toy #6 (2021)

    A final clutch of bird-based photographs, kicked-off by The Kick-About #33, and the method was a little different this time. An animation sequence was created from this previous set of photographs, which was then layered twice, with new stills exported from the resulting composite. I wanted to see if I could further efface the original…

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  • Chimera Book 1 / Chapter 19 – Thingopolis Under Attack!

    Good things come to those who wait… and I’m very happy to announce the latest chapter of Chimera Book 1 is here! With only two more instalments to go, Kyp’s adventures in the fantastical realm of lost properties continue apace. Huge thanks, as always, to Dan Snelgrove for finding the time, energy and vocal dexterity…

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