Lenticel #1

For this weeks kick about on Red’s Kingdom I resurrected a previous series for the painting Tannenwald by Gustav Klimt. I’ve always been fascinated by the detailed scratchings of birch trees, like little beady eyes amongst the white trunks. Back home in Ireland, down a picturesque route swarmed by sleepy sheep, there is a gorgeous forest of sitka spruces and birch trees. My neighbours don’t bat an eyelash when I hop over the fence with my camera in hand. I took a bunch of these photos at different times of the year and made an impressionistic mixed media series a while ago called Lenticels, where I painted over the photos, mimicking the same textures to encapsulate my impressions of this magical place. I loved this series and happened to take more photos this past winter and made a few more to add to the series for this week’s Klimt prompt.

Sheeler #2

A second set of shapely images from the resulting film – entitled Sheeler created for this weeks Kick about on Red’s Kingdom. Galvanised by the art of Charles Sheeler, I had this film in mind, aiming to see those geometric shapes moving through space accompanied by lots of colour that interject and melt into each other. It was a joy to create and felt as though everything flowed and fell into place better than I could have imagined.

Sheeler #1

Charles Sheeler being the muse for the latest creative Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom stimulated me to create a film. Sheeler’s modernist work makes me ponder the industrial revolution, the building up and tearing down of sprawling metropolises in all their in-betweens of metal, cement and beams. The shapely blocks of colour makes me think of movement, like a time-lapse of something that is always being altered. I created my film by modelling quick and dirty shapes in 3D, then tinkered with the camera to pull the focal length back and added many of the shapes in a line, through which the camera cranes. I added little movements here and there to the shapes to make things feel dynamic.

Pom Pom #2

A second set of images created from the inspiration of textile artist Sheila Hicks. This set focusing on the lurid red that tinged the pom pom’s and changed the tone of the efforts. One thing I really attempted to achieve was the scale of Hicks’s pieces, I tried to mimic that by zooming out of the set and photographing wide angled while placing the viewer as low to the ground as possible   

Pom Pom #1

This weeks Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom is the textile installation art of Sheila Hicks. After having to buy a new washing machine, I kept some of the styrofoam that came in the packaging. Call me a hoarder all you like, but I knew I could make something out of the grooves and shapes warped into the styrofoam mirroring the details of the machine. So I spray painted the styrofoam black and bought a bag of colourful cotton pom-pom balls to design the set of this miniature Hicks installation then lit it ablaze with some dramatic lighting and documented the process. Things took a more sci-fi, macabre turn when I decided to use some red gels – more of those attempts to come.   

Still Life

This week’s Kick About on Red’s Kingdom is an excerpt from part two of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I thought about doing an illustration of a grand hall worthy of a queen, pooling with rim light, but I really wanted to do something physical and with my hands, mainly to crack into the little art studio I have revamped so that I don’t turn my bedroom into a catastrophe of shite while doing Kick-Abouts late into the night like this, so some still life photography it is then! Something about the grandiosity of the poem, the spectacle of the conceitedness, signified a sense of danger and something uglier underneath. With these photos, I wanted to tell a story – they may look aesthetic and familiar, but things are not as they seem – much like those in power, littered with gold and jewels, but who are usually the most corrupt imposters of all, and wear their porcelain masks to hide behind a facade. I took and borrowed elements of my own and my roommates, including my jewellery, my favourite wine glass I accidentally smashed and plucked out of the garbage, silk pillowcases, lots of fruit, and trimmings of plants I nicked on my neighbourhood runs.”