This weeks kick about prompt on Red’s Kingdom is the melancholic coo’s of Molly Drake’s I remember. The song brought a tear to my eye, how such a poet can write something so striking about the melancholic juxtaposition of both light and dark. It brought back memories of people that have come and gone out of my life, but also the places where those memories and faces come bubbling up when passing in a car or walking past a particular patch of land, like reveries of times I will never forget.”
Something a bit random and rather eerie for this post. Doing a bit of landscaping around the house to empty the leaf litter into the bins I was perplexed when I opened up the otherwise untouched bin to first notice the hefty spiders scuttle away amongst the eroding leaves but shocked to notice the sparkling webs sitting above the leaves reflecting the trees from above in a pulpy oozy green. I’ve never seen a spider web like it – the webbing so thick like a slime or saliva from a much bigger creature. It’s as if the garbage juice residue amongst the bin caused some sort of condensation to attach and grow the web in size. I couldn’t help but snap some pictures – with the dangling cocoon framed and suspended in a silky diamond chamber, the funnel of web leading towards it. Nightmarish stuff!
If you have Trypophobia look away now! I experimented with a different type of reaction with some of these outputs in particular the image above as at this point in the fun of this creative outpouring I started throwing in different elements at different times to see what transpires. Vinegar and baking soda made those frothy, bubbly effects like the cells of some sort of plant peered under a microscope, or the many eggs of some alien species about to burst.
A second cluster of images from this weeks Kick About inspired by textile artist – Louise Baldwin. These images were created in a very lofi method of simply mixing a plethora of ingredients including vegetable oil, water, food colouring and an alka seltzer tablet in a bell jar and capturing the mesmerising reaction as it occurred and settled. In some photographs the sphere of the jar can be seen, like some sort of technicolour meteorite shower heading to an unknown land.
This weeks Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom is contemporary textile artist – Louise Baldwin. I felt a very instinct reaction to this weeks kick about and wanted to focus on two things – shapes and colour. I reconcile one of the most enjoyable kick about’s thus far being the prompt and singular word “Souvenir” where I set up a miniature installation in my bedroom entitled Giant in a Jar and took photographs of garishly lit jars to then superimpose my hairy mug into that jar. The innate feeling of fuck knows how this will turn out but transforming to elation when something clicks and having it work out is always such an enjoyable experience that I want to reproduce.
So I went to my cupboards and my roommates to see what I could get my grubby hands on including, vegetable oil, food colouring, vinegar, baking soda and alkaline seltzers. I then set the stage using that same jar from Souvenir to create a makeshift lava lamp and tried to capture the reaction when I added all the ingredients and after the final plop of the alka seltzer in all its bubbly, frothy, fizzy spectacle. The original plan was to photograph the side of the jar as the reaction occurred but it proved rather limp and blurry, but having a look through the top of the jar and repositioning the many lights brimming up the scene changed things drastically. These miniature galaxies full of depth began to form with and the feeling it gave was utterly intoxicating. In the early hours of the morning when most other people were sleeping I was taking hundreds of photos of this concoction in a jar so expect a lot more to come.
A final set of dust and gleaming hair strands in relation to Gaston Bachelards words of lived in spaces. Sometimes I would vigorously pat the rug where these unheimlich mounds lay to get some dust orbs to show up in camera, sometimes it worked sometimes not, but it was always a joy to see when the camera picked them up.
As I played with various areas around my house I found other unbeknownst oddities in the depths of livid in spaces – an apple core, or the tendrils of one of my favourite but fraying jumpers. A while ago before these photos were taken, I had to change a lightbulb in my bathroom – the light source being one of those little spotlights that are embedded into the ceiling, to my horror upon unscrewing the light – the many mummified carcasses of bees fell from above the crevice and glided their way down to the floorboards.. I definitely should have hoovered more throughly. You can see one of the little fellas in these photos, having him rest on a clump of hair and dust feels like something you might see on natural history about cordyceps where the spores of fungus have attached to the brain of an inebriated insect and ultimately burst through the shells of the little critters.
A second set of macro photography inspired by the words of Gaston Bachelard. Being the hirsute kind, spiralling hair clumps who knows from where and floating dust orbs make up the most of these compositions, illuminated by a tiny but mighty LED light with sweet wrappers used as gels. Most of these photos were taken in my bedroom where a grasp through my rug pulled out bunches of hair. I loved when the camera was able to pick up mounds of dust caught in the webs of hair shafts, like an insect glued to a spiders web.
This weeks Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom is the stimulating words of Gaston Bachelard – “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space” I found Gaston Bachelard’s words very inspiring – along with a chat with Phil Gomm I too wanted to capture that feeling of space feeling occupied by showing the wondrous shedding of life that lived in spaces has an abundance of, especially where you usually don’t look. Me being a hairy bastard I have so much scatterings of hair matted into carpets you could make a toupée, So pictured here are clumps of hair with the usual sprinklings of dust, dead skin cells and other oddities that life and space always conjures up.
A few final eerie photographs from back in December when the fog was so dense it made this usually busy park feel completely barren. As I was walking through the quietened park in the early hours of the morning, I happened across a broken tree branch that still had its leaves left, I liked the way the full leaves looked against the looming wispy trees in the distance – as if they’ve been submerged to some sort of chemical within the mist that strips them bare.
Gentle Giant 