A study of the moiré patterns that are generated when a mesh is placed above a mirror.
The mesh is rolled into a cone shape which creates moiré patterns where the mesh overlaps itself.
A concave mirror at the base of the mesh creates an enlarged and distorted image of the mesh, further complicating the patterns that the mesh generates.
The mirror in this study is a convex mirror taken from a bicycle rear view mirror with the mirror inverted to expose the concave rear of the mirror. The mesh is the plastic mesh from a supermarket pack of easy peel oranges.
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.
On the escalator. Seeing the world from an unusual angle.
Video. 45 seconds. May 2023
A video of people going down an down escalator at a London Underground station. I was going up the up escalator.
The video was shot at an angle so that the sloping architecture of the escalator occupied the horizontal plane in the video.
One of the metaphorical points of the video is the idea of looking at the world from unusual angles as a way of getting away from conventional ways of thinking and of conventional perception. It’s also quite humorous, which is something I often strive for.
Tilting the world to unusual angles is a concept I’ve pursued multiple times. An early example was in the early 1970s when I toyed with the idea of writing a short story about an isolated community that lived in a town half way up a very steep hill. The hill was so big that the people couldn’t see the top or the bottom, so they didn’t realise that they actually lived on a slope. All they knew was that there was a strange force (gravity) that meant that objects were only stable when they were at a particular angle to the ground and orientated in a particular direction. And that walking towards one side of town (uphill) was quite hard work, while walking in the opposite direction (downhill) was easy.
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.
A watercolour painting from the imagination, depicting a tree in a sinister landscape. The dark foreboding atmosphere of the painting is partly to reflect the atmosphere of the ongoing environmental crisis and partly to reflect the atmosphere of thinking about it.
The tree looks as though it has uprooted itself and is trying to get away from its environment by using its roots as limbs. Alternatively, maybe the ground around the tree’s roots has been washed way as part of environmental degradation (perhaps by floods caused by climate change or by people’s exploitation of the land), literally sweeping away or undermining the foundations of a sustainable environment. And what are those objects next to the tree?
Mirror art featuring a mirror and two coloured hemispheres.
Mirror, wood. acrylic. 30x30x12cm. August 2024
A work on one of my recurring themes of mirrors.
In this work a hemisphere can be seen reflected in a mirror. The hemisphere is positioned so that its reflected image appears in exactly the same location as a second real hemisphere. The second hemisphere is a different colour.
It’s a simple yet arresting effect.
The reflective coating on the mirror is on its front surface rather than the more usual rear surface. This is to avoid the presence of the ghost reflections that are produced by the glass front surface of conventional mirrors.
I’ve been experimenting with mirror based optical illusions and effects like the one in this work since the early 2010s. The main difference between this piece and most of my previous ones is that this one is wall mounted. My interest in mirrors and optics in general date back about fifty five years to when I constructed an astronomical telescope (including grinding the parabolic mirror).
A surreal sea creature drawn from the imagination.
Digital image. 6th May 2023
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.
Wood battens, acrylic paint. Length: 2m (variable). June 2018.
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.
Watecolour painting using collage (April 2021) with digital additions (Oct 2023).
A spontaneous semi-abstract watercolour painting with additions in Adobe Photoshop (added several years later, so it’s not that spontaneous).
The watercolour rock-like object is collaged onto the sky, with the line work added later digitally.
The painting is meant to have a sinister edge to it, with the rock-like form being some sort of creature. I’m very interested in the way that people see some creatures as being cure (baby mammals, especially furry ones being a prime example) and other creatures as being repellant (even at the baby stage).
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.
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).
Convex mirrors, papier maché, metalic acrylic 30x40cm March 2022
Three convex mirrors mounted behind paper maché painted with metallic acrylic.
The distorting and illusionistic effects of mirrors are a significant feature of a lot of my work. The mirrors in this piece are mirrors from bicycle rear-view mirrors.
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).
