Mirrors, wood blocks, acrylic 30x30x27cm January 2022
Two angled mirrors creating multiple reflections.
The mirrors are angled at 45º to each other and the wood blocks between the mirrors each have a 45º angle at one end, allowing them to fit perfectly into the space between the mirrors.
The wood blocks are movable, allowing different patterns to be created. Due to the 45º angles of the mirrors the patterns are often in the form of crosses with square elements superimposed.
A sculpture composed of a mirror with a sculptural form made of card and paper attached to its surface. The card and paper are painted with acrylic paint.
The interlinking of, and interplay between, the horizontal and vertical forms in the sculpture are significant features of the piece.
The upright sculptural forms are held in place on the mirror by magnets attached to the back of the mirror. The magnets attract small pieces of steel tape that are embedded in the card of the sculpture. This ensures that the sculpture can be held invisibly on the mirror, with no obvious means of attachment such as fasteners or glue.
The mirror in this piece is a standard rear-coated mirror, so there is a separation between the objects on the mirror and their reflections. Some of the pieces on the mirror are painted a different colour on the side that is facing the mirror so that the underside adds an extra element to the composition. In other works where I don’t want a separation between the objects and their reflections I use front-coated mirrors.
A sculpture composed of a pair of large pliers and a pair of small pliers. I suppose it fits into the category of sculpture made with found objects or sculptures made of scrap. The pliers are held together by a magnet, although they do actually balance without it, if a bit precariously. The resulting figure resembles a person with arms held high and with horns. Maybe a demon. The figure actually reminds me of a bodybuilder: the stocky torso and muscular legs, not to mention the pose.
A mirror piece consisting of a semicircle of card half of which passes inside a box-like construction. The semicircle and box are resting on a mirror so that the semicircle appears to be part of a full circle that enters and exits the box.
The reflection of the box makes the box appear to be half of a square structure, with the circle entering and leaving the interior of the square via its openings where the square is cut. This gives rise to the title of the piece, Squaring the Circle.
The mirror is a front-coated (or first-coated) mirror. Unlike standard mirrors that have their reflective coating on the rear surface of the glass front-coated mirrors have the reflective surface on the front. With a standard mirror the thickness of the glass creates a gap or space between the object on the glass and the reflection, while with a front-coated mirror the object and the reflection are ‘touching’.
A wall mounted sculpture composed of a mirror with a sculptural form made of card attached to its surface. The card is painted with acrylic paint.
The sculptural form is held in place on the mirror by a magnet attached to the back of the mirror. The magnet attracts a small piece of steel tape that is embedded in the card of the sculpture. This ensures that the sculpture can be held invisibly on the mirror, with no obvious means of attachment such as bolts or glue.
The mirror is a front-coated (or first-coated) mirror. Unlike standard mirrors that have their reflective coating on the rear surface of the glass front-coated mirrors have the reflective surface on the front. If a standard mirror had been used the thickness of the glass would have created a gap or space between the object on the glass and its reflection, while with a front-coated mirror the object and the reflection are ‘touching’.
Prestige steel baking tray on front of glazed picture frame 46x60cm 2008
A work created from a mundane everyday object – a kitchen baking tray – mounted on the exterior of a glazed picture frame.
One of the motivations behind the work was to show the beauty and rich visual interest intrinsic in mundane objects from mundane environments.
Below is a detail of the intricate patterns and patina on the steel surface of the baking tray. The word ‘Prestige’ it the centre is an important feature.
I’ve been interested in the concept of finding beauty in the mundane ever since I admired the colours in the film of detergent on a wire mess kitchen utensil (maybe a cake stand) as it caught the sun. That was in my parents’ kitchen about sixty years ago.
Wood, plastic. June 2022. Solo exhibition, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall.
A mobile sculpture consisting of wooden spheres with plastic hands that form wings.
Hands are a recurrent theme in my work, as is flight. I’ve created several works that feature hands as wings, usually in the form of sketches and other drawings.
Using hands as wings is actually far from being far-fetched. The wings of birds and bats both evolved from hands (which is why birds and bats don’t have hands – it’s a choice of one or the other. Angels and fairies have both, but they are made up and are anatomically incorrect). Insect wings evolved along a different route, possibly from heat-gathering flaps or panels (insects being very dependant on the heat of the sun).
The symbolism of flight is linked closely with the concept of freedom. This link can be overstated, I think, especially when we project it onto the natural world. We envy the flight of birds, but birds don’t fly because they are free. Small birds that in theory can fly wherever they please often tend to spend their whole lives in a single place such as an individual tree. Some of them may migrate thousands of miles to reach their chosen tree, but they’ve possibly travelled there from another individual tree in a different part of the world. On top of this, on isolated islands that have no predators birds frequently lose the power of flight, so flying obviously isn’t one of their primary concerns.
Two mirrors joined along their bottom horizontal edges are held at an angle to each other. Placed between the mirrors are three painted card sections of circles. Multiple reflections of the sections of card around the axis of the joined mirrors produce full circles. There are six reflections (or multiple reflections) in the mirrors, creating a full circle composed of seven sections.
A second component of coloured card is lying flat on the surface beside the mirror structure. The shape and colour of this second construction add another dimension to the assemblage as a whole. The fact that this part of the piece is in two colours and that it forms only part of a ring add to the resonance of the structure.
Below is a video of the sculpture. Because of the nature of the multiple reflections in the mirrors it’s particularly important to see the sculpture from different angles.
A contemporary art print of an old snail shell on the top of a cylindrical marble plinth. The snail shell has lost all of its colour due to its age and the amount of time that it had spent outside in the elements. It is now almost indistinguishable from the marble of the plinth on which it rests.
The photograph is taken from a small sculpture that I created from a snail shell found in my garden (It’s the shell of a common garden snail, cornu aspersum).
One of the things that I like about this piece is the fact that the old snail shell is incredibly fragile and light while the marble is hard and heavy, yet they both look remarkably similar on the surface. It is a piece partly concerned with the nature of superficial appearance. It’s also aesthetically pleasing, with all of those curved and rounded forms.
The fragile snail shell evokes feelings about the fragility of nature and the environment in the time of the ongoing environmental crisis.
A mole wrench and an oil can cap create an anthropomorphic sculpture suggesting an embracing couple.
The sculpture came about when I was about to put teak oil on my kitchen worktop, which was something I’d been putting off for the previous five years. The cap of the tin of teak oil was rusted in place due to lack of use and I had to take it off using a mole wrench. Holding the resulting wrench and cap combination instantly I sensed the potential for it to be a work of art in some way, partly because the oil can’s cap resembled an eye when the light struck it. At first I thought that the assemblage perhaps resembled a fish, but after a bit of turning it round in my hands I saw human forms emerge.
This is a good example of the way that people can interpret objects differently to the nature of the objects themselves. I believe that our brains interpret things based on a hierarchy of significance. The brain sees something and then scans down a list of likely possibilities for what the thing is, with highly significant things at the top of the list. At the very top of the list is ‘human being’. Very much lower down the list, if it’s on the list a all, is ‘mole wrench’. When you see a mole wrench in a tool box you automatically go straight to the ‘mole wrench’ item way down your brain’s list, because the context in which you see the wrench is strongly suggestive that it is indeed a mole wrench that you’re looking at. However, in the context-free setting of the photo above your brain has to work harder and has to consult its built-in list of possibilities, at the top of which is ‘human being’. The wrench possesses something of the shape of a human form, and thus the connection is made. The fact that the wrench is standing in a way that no mole wrench in the real world could do without support helps to amplify the effect.
A ceramic pot with a bicycle saddle. The bicycle saddle is attached to a conventional bicycle seat pillar which is inserted into the narrow opening at the top of the ceramic vessel.
In the context of the sculpture the shape of the bike seat automatically evokes the form of an animal head.
Whenever the words bicycle seat, animal head and art are mentioned in the same sentence the name of Pablo Picasso and his 1942 work, Bull’s Head, inevitably come to mind. But we mustn’t let the great man’s work prevent the rest of us from using the same idea. He probably wasn’t the first person to think it up anyway, just the most famous. Remember, it was him who said “Good artists copy. Great artists steal”
In my sculpture the bicycle saddle doesn’t only suggest an animal head. Something about its shape also evokes the concept of a sail or of some form of crest shaped modern architectural structure.
Below is a variation of the sculpture where I’ve cleaved the saddle firmly to its animal head incarnation by adding a pair of headphones. The headphones have the pleasing effect of looking like a weird pair of eyes as well as a pair of headphones. The idea of adding the headphones came to me simply because there was pair of headphones lying on the floor next to the sculpture.
An anthropomorphic sculpture made of found objects.
The doll’s head was found buried in my garden and the empty custard carton was found in my kitchen.
The custard carton has been squeezed to extract every last bit of custard from inside. It was a simple matter to create a ready-made sculpture by attaching the doll’s head to the cap of the carton, especially as the head was rather sinisterly only the front of the head, thus it possessed a convenient rim that could be gripped by the carton’s screw cap.
With the doll’s head attached, the custard carton is instantly transformed from being a crumpled piece of consumer waste into a doll’s body or a baby’s body. A quite disturbing body at that.
The interpretation of the carton as a body in this sculpture is the result of the phenomenon of pareidolia, which is the tendency to see significant forms where they don’t exist (Faces in clouds and such-like). The presence of the doll’s head helps of course. Art, especially modern and contemporary art, is hugely reliant on pareidolia, as it allows a circle with a couple of dots inside it to become a human face.
The Oppressor Empaled. A sculpture about oppression.
Hammer, nails, wood. 18x34x26cm. May 2023.
This sculpture is a work of political art, in the form of 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 dictatorship and the nails are symbols of the oppressed. But the sculpture poses a question – how did the nails manage to drive themselves into 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.
The leaders of liberation movements against repression often become oppressors or dictators in their turn.
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 driven into it. Since then it developed into a 3D sculptural work composed of a hammer nailed directly onto a flat surface as though pinned down. The iteration here has the hammer suspended above a surface and with many more nails driven into it so that it’s starting to resemble a nail fetish figure.
At first sight this work looks like a dark ellipse painted onto a blue background. Closer inspection reveals that the ellipse is in fact made of fur and that it protrudes some distance from the flat blue surface.
A close-up detail of the work.
The fur is dark and matt, making its texture quite hard to see without close inspection. As a result most casual observers don’t notice. A close inspection is however rewarded with the realisation of what is being looked at.
This work exhibits my interest in interpreting perception, illusion and expectations.
Optically deceptive artworks in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, 2022. The fur piece is the far one.
Three hammers bound together with shoe laces. The hammers are different sizes, creating a dynamic visual effect and implying a differential power status between the hammers.
The fact that the hammers are bound together renders them useless as hammers, making them impotent. However, maybe they’re not bound together to reduce their power – maybe they are bound together to create unity. Maybe the price of unity is a reduction in individual power. But is the price of unit a reduction in group power?
The hammers exhibited in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, 2022.
The work is a study of power, restraint and impotence. It’s also a nice composition. The inspiration came in my studio when I placed one hammer directly on top of another one (By chance or deliberately? I don’t know).
A sculpture composed of a pair of splayed handyman’s pliers and a painted plastercast of the inside of a coffee filter cone.
Pliers and other handyman’s tools such as hammers and spanners are recurrent features in some of my constructions.
The work is probably influenced by the Arte Povera movement, and the plastercast of the inside of the coffee filter may owe something to artists such as Rachel Whiteread (although I don’t think that she’s known for adding colour to her casts).
An installation composed of three clothes racks forming a pyramid.
The pyramid of racks is this size purely because I only possess three clothes racks. Given a larger space and a larger number of racks the pyramid can be huge. You may notice in the photo that as well as a pausity of racks the low ceiling in the room mitigates against the construction of monumental artworks.
This is a typical example of a work that almost created itself (I thought of it while I was moving the racks so that I could dry my washing). I have often admired the interplay of the horizontal and diagonal lines in the racks while I was using them for their proper purpose, but it was only recently that the idea of stacking them occurred to me.
This work is probably partly inspired by the art movements of constructivism, dada and arte povera.
A cluster of organic forms, possibly resembling aquatic lifeforms. The small indentations in the top of some of the cones adds to the organic effect. The worm-like appearance of the cones makes them a slightly disturbing.
Environmental art sculpture, commercially bought globes. February 2023.
The sculpture is composed of one large globe with several smaller globes attached to it.
The use of a globe of the Earth in the sculpture reflects my interest in environmental issues and in creating environmental art. My concerns about environmentalism go back to the 1960s, when I was mainly concerned with threats to wildlife. Since then the list of environmental concerns has grown and now includes climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation and other aspects of environmentalism.
One of several interpretations of the work is that it shows that on the one physical planet Earth there exist multiple cultural world-views.
Contemporary art sculpture/installation. January 2017
I’ve been creating environmental art in one form or another since about 1970. This work is a development of a previous work from the late 1980s.
The work is a sculpture showing how I feel the human race is treating the environment – by putting the planet into the rubbish bin. The sculpture consists of a standard kitchen waste bin, lined internally with very matte black material and with a back-lit image of the earth at its base. The result is the illusion that by looking into the bin you are looking into outer space as though through a porthole in a spacecraft, with the earth floating in the distance. It’s surprisingly effective. The kitchen waste bin was deliberately chosen as the reciprocal that contains the earth because of its banality, to emphasise how we are causing environmental damage by depleting the earth’s resources through mundane consumption.
A version of this work was shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2022 and was exhibited in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, the same year.
