A photograph of a fox’s skull. Nice abstract sculptural quality I think, accentuated by the lighting and the simple composition. Like many people, I find bones, especially skulls, very evocative. I think that it’s possibly a mix of the aesthetic qualities of the physical form of the bones and a realisation of what they actually are. They are a very concrete reminder of the transience of life: memento mori. You’d have to ask an evolutionnary psychologist what it is that makes them aesthetically pleasing, or indeed what it is that makes anything aesthetically pleasing.
The generation of complex forms from simple forms.
Digital works. Series begun 2008
This is a design to accompany a series of video animations that explore the creation of complex forms from simple forms. The animations are often in the form of rotating grids, though not always. The works were first conceived as a device to visualise the creation of the complex structure that underlies the physical universe from extremely simple fundamental components. Very much an example of art meets science. More on the subject.
I’ve been drawing and publishing cartoons since the late 1970s, on subjects such as the environment, politics, the arts, science, philosophy and current events.
They have been published in the Guardian, Private Eye, The Spectator, Prospect, Philosophy Now, BBC Focus, Chemistry World and New Scientist among others.
These photos show one of my early artistic experiments using mirrors while I was still at school. My apologises for the quality of the images – they are quite old and I developed the negatives and printed them myself.
I think if I were give this work a name now I’d probably call it Sky Bridge or something similar, because it links the earth to the sky. The name Sky Mirror also comes to mind, but Anish Kapoor’s already used that.
The concept behind the mirror actually bears several similarities to Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, in that it’s a concave mirror that reflects the sky, although Kapoor’s Sky Mirror is thirty times the size and cost about a million pounds more. I think I probably paid for this one from the money from my paper round. Anish Kapoor wasn’t yet a student at Hornsey College of Art at the time of these photos.
The mirror is an eight and a half inch parabolic mirror for a Newtonian reflecting telescope which I constructed as a teenager in the late 1960s. My ambition then was to become an astronomer, not an artist. I ground the parabolic surface of the mirror myself.
As you can see from the first two photos, I’ve positioned the mirror in front of a rubbish bin (of a type that was used in the 1970s) in the least aesthetically pleasing part of my parents’ garden.
The second photo, below, (which is massively underexposed in order to show the mirror, which would otherwise be just a disk of burnt-out white), shows the mirror propped up against the rubbish bin. You can see the sun and the sky reflected in the mirror. This is perhaps meant to show the contrast between the beauty and purity of the sky in contrast to some of the rubbish created by human society. It’s probably also meant to show that ultimately everything is connected, the beautiful and the ugly, the transcendent and the mundane.
The photo below shows the mirror on the ground amongst some trees. This is probably meant to show the link between the earth, the natural world and the sky, and by extension the cosmos.
The results of a fire made of green wood. The wood at the centre of the fire has been consumed by the intense heat of the fire. The wood at the edges of the fire remain unburnt, forming an almost perfect ring of twigs and small branches around the ash core. The work invokes issues conncerning both the constructive and destructive effects of fire, and by extension of human activity.
I’ve been creating environmental art and art based on environmental issues since the 1970s.
