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At the beginning of the month, I went out to the top of Hart Hill, where a large field of whiskery barley covers the gentle camber of the hill. On that particular day, the sun was awol and the rain intensifying, so I didn’t stay long, though long enough to delight at the way the…
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With Jean Cocteau as our guest referee, little wonder the Kick-About #4 was a game of magical doorways, shadowy thresholds and nebulous reflections. This time we have Alice Neel as our muse, whose uncompromising paintings have, hardly surprisingly, prompted a range of provocative impressions from our motley crew of up-for-it creatives. Happy browsing.
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My ex never rated Ella Fitzgerald. He found her vocal seamlessness anodyne, preferring the gravel of Dinah Washington, the rasp of Etta James, the smoke of Sarah Vaughn. He found Ella too polite, too popular, too ubiquitous, desexed. For all of that, as a gay man of a certain age whose identity had been criminalised…
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I’m delighted to announce Emily Clarkson is taking up a residency at Red’s Kingdom, joining Tom Beg and Graeme Daly as featured creatives. Truth be known, I’ve been badgering Emily to get her feet under Red’s table for a while now and we’ll be talking about her initial reluctance a little later. Before that, I…
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Lately, there has been an outbreak of portals here at Red’s Kingdom – the sudden appearance of doorways to other realms. The same was true back in the Summer of 2016, when I was witness to some equally extraordinary sights manifesting in the forlorn empty rooms of an old sprawling house somewhere in the Medway…
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Inside Time is a look at the experience of lockdown that isn’t about headlines or statistics but about the small, simple ways in which it has perhaps transformed us, taught us something about time, about ourselves inside time. About how it stopped the clock for all of us.
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No golden hour this evening, only grey light, soft rain and some boisterous breezes. Still, the fresh-looking wheat field at the top of Hart Hill was wonderfully alive with the wind, ears of wheat darting every which way like tiny panicked fish.
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When it came to my parenting, my step-dad had one solemn rule for me: I was never ever to tell him how certain things in his favourite movies were accomplished. Behind-the-scenes documentaries were forbidden. Chats about puppets, animatronics and green-screen wizardry were quickly curtailed. For my step-dad, the movies are real, the dialogue arriving in…
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Any regular visitors to Red’s Kingdom will already be familiar with the work of Artist-in-Residence, Graeme Daly, who is working hard on developing his second animated short, The Green Glider.
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Stop-motion has a very special power of strangeness; stop-motion is to motion what the undead is to the living – not an opposite state, but something not quite opposite enough. The Brothers Quay understand this with their hollow-headed dolls and imminent toys. Jan Švankmajer understands this with his clawing clay heads and dancing meat. Robert…
Red's Kingdom 