
A second set of Calder-inspired photographs, produced in response to the Kick-About No.44, and achieved through the simple means of photographing a garland of cellophane wrappers, unfurled from a great many Quality Street chocolates…




A second set of Calder-inspired photographs, produced in response to the Kick-About No.44, and achieved through the simple means of photographing a garland of cellophane wrappers, unfurled from a great many Quality Street chocolates…
With one of Alexander Calder’s wonderful sculptures-comes-mobiles as the prompt for the latest Kick-About, I initially set about producing these digital compositions in Photoshop. I then happened on a much more lo-fi opportunity, resulting from my husband’s impressive consumption of Quality Street chocolates over the Christmas period; Quality Street come wrapped in these lovely squares of coloured cellophane, which my husband turned into an ad-hoc garland hanging down from the mirror – in glorification of his gluttony!
Suspending the streamer of sweet wrappers from the ceiling, I set out about photographing it from below – lying on my back on the floor and framing the shots to avoid the presence of the cobwebs and the smoke detector! I enjoyed very much the water-colouresque results in all their floatiness, and I’m tempted to draw some conclusion here about the routes towards inspiration being found more-often-than-not in the realm of analogue activities.
I love Alexander Calder’s work, so in response to the prompt for the Kick-About #44, I wanted to build some similar whirling thing in my house, and then seek to capture ideas of movement, flight, shadow and light in some kind of photographic response. I settled on the idea of producing imagery using virtual components only, so first building some Calder-inspired shapes in Photoshop and then combining them to produce these ‘snapshots’ of their imaginary interactions.