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These Nnenna Okore-inspired images for The Kick-About No. 140 began simply enough as photographs of the caustics at the bottom of a holiday swimming pool. The ‘netting effect’ of the sunlit water on the bottom of the pool put me in mind of Okore’s own fabrics, so I set myself the trial-and-error task of working…
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Our last Kick-About lingered in the half-light, drawing inspiration from the phrase In Praise of Shadows. This week, our muse is the artist Nnenna Okore, whose tactile, organic sculptures are often shaped from everyday or discarded materials. Her work transforms the ordinary into something alive with texture and movement, evoking cycles of growth, decay and…
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At the very end of July, I was visited by a small team of creative people from The Modern House—not because my house is ‘modern’ (it’s not), but because they’ve launched a new thread about gardens too. Lifelong gardener and journalist Francine Raymond is leading the series How My Garden Grows and she is exploring…
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A few weeks back I was on holiday at a house with a small swimming pool. It was incredibly hot, and the pool was beloved by clouds of thirsty wasps and hornets, so floating about on a lilo was often an act of courage. We had some friends staying with us, and much of our…
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I was away in France two weeks ago in an old house that always inspires me to channel my inner ‘spirit photographer’, hoping to create and/or capture some kind of phantasmagoria with my camera. The latest KA prompt saw me thinking about how I could manifest a shadowy apparition in the looking glass of the…
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In our last Kick-About, Jawlensky’s Girl with the Green Face challenged us with its bold colours and enigmatic expression. This week’s prompt, “In Praise of Shadows,” invites us to notice the quieter qualities of shade and atmosphere. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time—and for all previous editions of The…
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At the beginning of August, it was carnival time again in Whitstable, this year with a Peter Cushing theme, in recognition of Cushing having lived in the town for 35 years until his death in 1994. It was fun, and all the more so thanks to the parade of adorable cardboard Daleks.
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I was very taken by the inner-life of this girl with the green face. She is giving someone, or something, some serious ‘side-eye’, and I was interested in finding out more about her. The resulting short story, Marguerite – written for The Kick-About No. 138 and directly inspired by the girl in Alexei von Jawlensky’s…
Red's Kingdom 