Contemporary Art
A sculpture composed of one large globe with several smaller globes attached to it.
One of several interpretations of the work is that it shows that on the one physical planet Earth there exist multiple cultural world-views.
The theme of planet Earth in the sculpture also reflects my interest in the state of the planet and my concerns for environmentalism (which has been a concern of mine since the 1960s).
A depiction of the concept of a superorganism.
A superorganism is the name given to such things as colonies of insects in which the members of the colony act together so that the whole colony functions as though it is a single entity, and in which the individual members of the colony are probably not viable to survive alone.
In the image hundreds (or maybe thousands – I lost count) of ants swarm across a rock and form into the shape of a huge single ant.
The subject of the image reflects my interest in both art and science.
Below is a detail of the work to show the appearance of the individual ants close-up.
The image was created in Affinity Designer .
This work is a an animation composed of overlapping identical grids of hexagons rotating relative to each other.
The piece works on a similar principal to Moiré patterns, however the results are made more complex by the inclusion of simple computer algorithms that make the patterns in the grids interact with each other so that, for instance, where black areas overlap each other they turn white.The work is a relatively fast and dynamic work from the series. Others are slower and more meditative.
The work is from a series that explores the generation of complexity from simplicity and is ultimately concerned with the visualisation of the basic underlying nature of the universe (which by its nature must be very simple) and the way that it gives rise to the immense complexity that we see around us.
A sketch of a leaping male figure with antlers.
I’ve drawn several images featuring men who have antlers growing from their heads. They are something to do with the concept of alpha males, or males who try to pass themselves off as alpha males. Linked to concepts of freedom and over-reaching ambition.
This print shows a dandelion seed head, or dandelion clock, with one of the seeds in flight. The seed resembles a human figure.
The image could be symbolic of freedom, although the slightly sinister nature of the image makes this ambiguous.
A digital sketch created for a print. It features a stylised insect drawn from my imagination.
The insect is drawn in a sketchy black and white style that is perhaps suggestive of images produced using traditional printmaking techniques such as woodcut, woodblock or linocut. It also reminds me of scraper board.
The black sky makes me think that it’s a nocturnal insect of some kind. It also looks a bit like a tortoise for some reason, with perhaps a bit of rhinoceros thrown in.
A print taken from a digital animation of expanding circles and rays.
The work is related to my interest in both art and science, and is inspired by the concept of the expansion of the universe.
I’ve been interested in both art and science most of my life. In fact in my youth (over fifty years ago) my ambition was to be an astronomer. I even constructed my own astronomical telescope, including grinding the parabolic mirror, when I was a teenager.
This sculpture is a work of political art, as it is partly a metaphor for oppression and rebellion.
The work shows a hammer empaled by nails.
Part of the concept behind the sculpture is that the hammer is being impaled by the objects that it normally hits – the nails. The hammer is a symbol of oppression and the nails are symbols of the oppressed.
But the sculpture poses the question – how did the nails manage to impale the hammer? Nails by their nature need a hammer, or a stand-in for a hammer, in order to be effective and to fulfil their purpose. Were the nails hammered into the hammer by another hammer? In that case the nails are not a metaphor for the oppressed rising up against their oppressor (the hammer) using their own power, but are more like the followers of another power (another hammer?) that may turn out to be as oppressive as the hammer that they’ve empaled.
This sculpture is a development of an idea that I had in 2010 when it started life as a drawing of a hammer with three nails in it.
Since then it developed into a 3D sculptural work composed of a hammer nailed directly onto a flat surface as though pinned down.
This further version has the hammer suspended above the surface and with many more nails driven into it so that it’s starting to resemble a nail fetish figure.
A bizarre sea creature created digitally in Procreate on an iPad. The shape of the sea creature is based on the number six, as the image was created as part of an exercise in which I sketched several images on my iPad based on the numbers between zero and nine. The concept behind the exercise was that by having to take into account the restraints of including a number in each image I would be forced to work with forms or shapes that I might not think up straight from my imagination.
When creating the sketch I was attempting to produce a bizarre, weird and sinister image. The result looks as though it owes a debt to surrealism, dada and the symbolists.
This piece of contemporary sculpture or land art was created on the granite rocks on the top of Zennor Hill in Cornwall, near where I live. It’s composed of three lengths of 2×2 inch wood batten of the type used in construction and joinery, painted with acrylic paint.
A print created from a frame from a digital abstract animation.
The abstract animation from which this print is taken consists primarily of brightly coloured repeating forms such as lines, stripes and spheres radiating outwards from the centre. The image here captures a particular moment in the expansion of the composition and has the status of a work in its own right.
The radiating lines and stripes, along with the bright colours, give the work a expansive and positive feel.
A digital image based on Marcel Duchamp’s Dada artwork, Fountain. Fountain is a ready-made in the form of a pissoir. The version of Fountain in the image is in Tate Modern in London (Duchamp created several versions of the work using different pissoirs. The original version no longer exists).
In this work a spider is trapped in the pissoir in the same way that spiders are trapped in baths.
The spider hopefully adds an extra touch of humour to a work that is already humourous. The humour partly resides in the fact that it’s unusual to see a spider where you don’t expect to see one (in an artwork), but at the same time the spider is exactly where you’d expect to see one (trapped in a piece of bathroom sanitary ware).
I’m a frequent visitor to Tate Modern, and whenever I look at Duchamp’s Fountain I’m struck by how esthetically pleasing the form of Fountain is. I’m not sure whether or not Duchamp thought this himself or whether he chose the pissoir with no esthetic considerations involved.