• Tin Toy #5 (2021)

    Tin Toy #5 (2021)

    With the addition of an old mirror, I was now able to get my little pecking blue bird ‘ice-skating’ in imperfect circles, producing these barely-there photographs that somehow bring to mind decorative motifs of the 1950’s. Again, the illustrative effects of long-exposure on this little tin toy and its lo-fi domestic set-up fills me with…

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  • Throwback Friday #68 Sidmouth (2000/2001)

    Twenty years-or-so ago, one of my oldest friends and I went on a couple of road-trips, stopping-off both times at Sidmouth in Devon. Sidmouth is a very genteel seaside town distinguished by its red sandstone cliffs – which you can’t appreciate in any of these black and white photographs! Our first visit was in the…

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  • Tin Toy #4 (2021)

    Tin Toy #4 (2021)

    A change of light and space for the little wind-up blue bird toy, the camera working harder, the subject of the photograph softening still further, with the highlights rim-lighting the toy’s outline producing whirling white propellers. I always love it when the in-camera transformations are so unexpected; I clapped by hands with child-like pleasure at…

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  • Tin Toy #3 (2021)

    Tin Toy #3 (2021)

    Another day, another tin-toy, and this time a rather wonderful clockwork ‘blue bird’ that pecks elegantly at the ground while turning in circles. Inspired by the creative gauntlet set down by The Kick-About #33, I continued to enjoy the vanishing effects of movement + long exposure, with the design and motion of this particular toy…

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  • Tin Toy #2 (2021)

    Tin Toy #2 (2021)

    So, recap… The Kick-About #33 got me thinking about dancing chickens and long-exposure photography, and in lieu of actual chickens, I sufficed with the clock-work variety. One of the tin-toys I sourced to meet this latest creative challenge was a little pecking chick, which, once wound-up and released, bounced around frenetically. I particularly liked the…

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  • Throwback Friday #67 Shellness #2 (2009)

    Another set of photographs from our 2009 trip to Shellness, which included games of pétanque on the beach’s perfect surface of pale, crushed shells.

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  • Artist-in-Residence: Tom Beg #10

    In between his various creative endeavours triggered by The Kick-About, and his day job designing and delivering the curricula for his English classes, Japan-based creative and Red’s Kingdom artist-in-residence, Tom Beg has continued work on his animated short, Tabula 5465. Time for a catch-up…

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  • Tin Toy #1 (2021)

    Tin Toy #1 (2021)

    I was struck by the folksy, pop-culture qualities of Herzog’s dancing chicken – our prompt for The Kick-About No. 33 – and I was keen to investigate the movement of these performing animals too. The rather forlorn spectacle of these animals, in boxes, existing to entertain through repetitive actions got me thinking about mechanical toys,…

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  • The Kick-About #33 ‘Herzog’s Dancing Chicken’

    After the epic, panoramic, and impressionist works riffing on Rutenberg’s Low Dense, I’m delighted to present an all-new showcase of work inspired by the improbable, homespun spectacle of Werner Herzog’s dancing chicken. (That’s not a sentence a person gets to write every day!). I’m delighted too to welcome some new kick-abouters into our midst, creative…

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  • Church Plantation #2 (2021)

    Another set of preposterously colourful photographs from the echium field at Church Plantation; like something from the seabed of a storybook.

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