A kinetic art work in the form of a mobile composed of spheres with wings. The wings are in the form of hands. In this video the mobile is positioned so that it is viewed against the sunset.
In this setting, with this lighting, the objects on the mobile resemble wheeling birds or similar flying creatures gathering at sunset and preparing for the night ahead.
The sound is the actual location soundtrack of birds’ evening chorus.
The work was originally created for my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens near Penzance in Cornwall in 2022. This video was taken in Zennor, Cornwall in May 2026.
The photograph below shows some of the winged creatures indoors.
Through the process of Darwinian evolution the wings of birds and bats (but not of insects) evolved from what were originally hands or claws, so the use of hands as wings in this artwork isn’t all that far-fetched.
Hammers are designed to strike blows. By tying several of them together they lose this ability, being rended impotent.
It invites interpretation as some sort of metaphor. The work was created largely because the components were to hand, with the composition coming together spontaneously and subconsciously. That doesn’t mean that there are no underlying meanings to the work of course – after all, why did I choose to pick up a few hammers rather than a few bottles of washing-up liquid?
This work was created for and was first exhibited in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens near Penzance in 2016.
It’s designed to hang on a wall, however in the image here it is on a sheet of plastic on the studio floor because I like the effect.
An assemblage composed of a ceramic vessel and a bicycle saddle. The saddle is attached to a bicycle seat pillar which is inserted into the narrow neck of the vessel. The vessel is placed on a tall stool.
The zoomorphic effect of the assemblage is to suggest some sort of creature, possibly a bird. The saddle resembles a head and the ceramic vessel a body. The stool may be a perch for a bird or even legs.
My work on show in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026.
A sculpture composed of a sequence of Polo mints on a wooden base.
The Polo mints are arranged in pairs, with the two mints in each pair interlocked, with each mint passing through the hole in the other.
The mints are real Polo mints.
Polo mints are very sculptural in their own right, especially with the excellent typography of the word Polo in relief on them. The mints were originally produced in 1948 by Rowntree in the UK and were based on the design of the US confectionary Life Savers (which Rowntree previously produced in the UK under license).
The sketch shows a bell. Inside the bell, in the place where the clapper should be, is a hanging man.
The image came to me spontaneously while I was looking at a bell. I think that part of the idea may be that the bell marks out time, announcing the hours,and therefore marks out life.
Bells are also tolled to mark out death.
The idea of people replacing the clappers in bells has since been used in the work SeawardVenice by Florentino Holzinger in the Austrian pavilion in the 2026 Venice Biannale. Holzinger’s work features real people dangling upside down in real bells.
There is a small sculptural version of my bell that features a real bell and a model of a person.
Contemporary sculpture composed of found objects, wooden hemispheres and card.
Idol. 25x10x8cm. September 2025
A sculpture created from two hammerheads, two ball bearings, six wooden hemispheres and length of card. The parts are held together by magnets.
The central components of this work are two hammerheads – artefacts that have been recurring features of my work for many years, usually in the form of drawings and more recently in the form of small scale sculptural work, The hammerheads are usually, but not always, used to represent the heads of people or animals.
A close-up of the surface of an artwork from my series featuring protruding and recessed hemispheres in flat surfaces.
This particular artwork is a wall hung sculpture filmed while lying horizontally. The interesting light effects are created by sunlight passing through trees outside the window. The texture of the artwork is created by mixing sand with gesso.
Exhibited at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, July and August 2025.
A work in my Black Whole series.
The works feature a hemispherical form protruding from the plane of the work and an equal and opposite hemispherical form receding into it.
The work was concieved partly as a visualisation of the positive and negative forces that underlie the physical structure of the universe. The concept is that at the most fundamental level of physical reality nothing exists except what can be thought of metaphorically as a flat featureless plane or surface. This featureless plane represents the existence of “nothingness” and is represented in the artwork by the flat surface of the work. A single disturbance to this plane creates a paired bulge and depression (just as a single wave creates a peak and a trough), represented in the work by the raised hemisphere and the recessed hemisphere.
The bulge and the depression are equal and opposite, so they can be thought of as cancelling each other out. As a result they add nothing to the “energy” at this fundamental level of reality. The fundamental plane is still. on average, flat. So, although something exists (in the form of the bulge and the depression), on average nothing still exists. The creation of ‘something’ does not alter the existence of nothing.
Nothing exists.
The work is painted very matt black to allude to the existence of nothing.
Steel sculpture: hammerhead with spheres 10x5x2cm May 2025
A sculpture composed of the head of a cross pein hammer with two steel spheres attached to its sides.
Hammerheads standing on end have an interesting anthropomorphic quality to them. This anthropomorphism is exploited in this work to create an ambiguous form.
The work possibly suggests a human figure with spheres in the place of arms. Or it could suggest the head of a creature such as an insect with the spheres as huge eyes.
The steel spheres are attached to the hammerhead by magnets.
Bridge. A sculpture as a metaphor for cooperation.
Document clips, wood 18x31x10cm Jan 2025
A sculpture composed of document clips that grip each other to form an arch or bridge. The bridge spans the gap between two pieces of wood on which the document clips stands.
Part of the concept behind the assemblage is that the arch of clips literally bridges the gap between the two separate parts of the base. The linked clips represent the concept of achievements that can only be made by cooperation with others (In this case with other document clips). It’s a metaphor for communication and cooperation.
The fact that the clips are in a variety of different colours is significant, as it represents diverse types of people cooperating. The colours aren’t meant to signify any particular quality of diversity such as race or sexuality, just diversity in general.
It’s quite a literal sculpture, conveying a straightforward concept. It’s also a simple and elegant form. Simple in form and simple in concept – that makes a change.
This work was displayed in the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol exhibition Paper Works, 2025.
A sculpture composed of two three dimensional hemispheres on a flat sheet, with one of the hemispheres protruding from one surface of the sheet and the other protruding from the other surface. Both hemispheres are hollow, so that relative to each surface of the flat card one hemisphere protrudes and the other creates a hollow. The sculpture is coated with very matt black acrylic paint (Stuart Semple Black 4).
The matt black colour of the sculpture makes the form deliberately difficult to interpret visually. This is especially the case with the hollows (possibly because the brain is not expecting there to be hollows in the surface).
On one level the work can be viewed as a simple intriguing puzzle that engages the viewer’s perception and cognition in interpreting the positive and negative forms that are generated by the hemispheres.
The work also has a metaphorical interpretation that relates to my interest in science: in this case in the fundamental nature of the universe.
In this interpretation the flat black plane of the sculpture can be thought of as representing the ‘base state’ of physical realityt (or below) the quantum level. Think of this state as being flat and featureless – a state in which nothing physical can meaningfully be said to actually exist – maybe the ‘resting’ state of the universe. Perhaps think of it as being comparable to a graph in which the line of the graph flatlines along the zero value of the x axis, indicating that there’s nothing to measure.
In the sculpture the two hemispheres disrupt the flat surface, creating the existence of form. Returning to the graph analogy, this is similar to the presence of two blips on the flatlining graph, with one blip going up and the other going down.
Because the hemispheres are hollow the pair create a bulge and a depression on each side of the flat surface, with the one that forms a bulge on one side of the sculpture forming a depression on the other side.
On either of the two sides of the flat surface, in terms of total volume, the bulge of one of the hemispheres and the depression of the other cancel each other out, with the negative volume of the depressed hemisphere cancelling the positive volume of the protruding one.
This can be thought of as an analogy for the physical nature of the universe at its most fundamental level. The flat featureless surface of the sculpture represents the flat featureless ‘surface’ of the fundamental universe when it is devoid of energy or matter and when nothing exists other than the ‘surface’. The pair of hemispheres conceptually represents a single fundamental ‘disturbance’ in the flat fearless surface, a single simplest element of existence perhaps analogous to the most fundamental of fundamental particles.
Importantly, because this fundamental disturbance is represented by two identical forms (the hemispheres) of which one has positive volume and one has negative volume which cancel out, the total volume of the disturbance is zero. This is analogous to the physical universe arising out of a state of nothingness (the flat surface) yet adding nothing to the volume, thus adding nothing to nothing.
So, although the universe exists it is still composed of nothing.
This work reflects my interest in both art and science (I started out on a scientific career before moving over to an artistic one).
tleI believe that art and science are often much more closely linked than is often assumed. There is for instance a huge amount of aesthetics in the appreciation of mathematics, and the study of the way that our senses make sense of the world is nothing if not a science.
The title, Black Whole, is obviously a pun on black hole.
Black Whole on display in the Royal West of England Academy, 2025
The work consists of a sheet of plastic mesh from the packaging for a pack of oranges.
I particularly like this piece because of the mundanity of its material.
I’ve been experimenting with the generation of moiré patterns and related optical effects for many years, often involving the interaction of digitally generated simple grids such as in the example below from 2008 or as seen here .
I’ve previously used the same sort of plastic mesh to create moiré patterns in an exhibit in my solo exhibition at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in 2022.
The term moiré pattern or moiré fringe comes from a type of French fabric called moire, in which two layers of fabric are pressed together to form a single sheet in which the slight misallignment of the fabric’s mesh generates patterns.
An earlier (2008) example of patterns generated by overlapping grids (this time produced digitally).
Shown in the ING Discerning Eye exhibition in the Mall Galleries, London, November 2024.
This sculpture, composed of a hammer and nails, symbolises the act of the oppressed overthrowing their oppressor. The nails represent the oppressed and the hammer represents their oppressor.
The metaphor raises a few questions . How did the nails become driven into the hammer? By another hammer? If so, is that other hammer a potential oppressor? Is the (unseen) second hammer just an oppressor in its own right, simply using the nails for its own ends?
Jar opener, spinning top, document clip, hand. 27x9x5cm (excluding hand). Feb 2024
An assemblage of household items (a jar opener, a spinning top and a document clip). In the photograph the assemblage is paired with a human hand to create an ambiguous form. There are suggestions of a flowering plant, a human form or an apparatus with a wheel.
A spontaneously conceived piece of artwork created while I was putting away the washing up in the kitchen. The shadows are created by the ceiling lights.
This is a good example of finding inspiration anywhere and in mundane objects and mundane places, and of the importance of being open to inspiration striking at any time.
In some ways it’s a piece of readymade art, being basically a fork plucked from my dish rack, however the importance of the shadows also makes it into shadow art in which the cast shadows are as important as the object casting the shadows.
Workman’s tools and handyman’s tools are a frequent feature of my work, with my first sketches of them dating from my early twenties, about fifty years ago.
I’ve always liked the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic qualities of hand tools. Pliers, such as the ones here, have legs that are suggestive of human legs and jaws that are suggestive of crocodile jaws or perhaps pterodactyl jaws. The business end of tin snips and garden pruners resemble the beaks of birds, and hammers have heads.
Another appeal about hand tools is their robust usefulness. They tend to look strong and they make hard physical work that much easier.
They are also nostalgic. In my youth my father had a garden shed that contained racks and racks of tools that were in constant use for repairing broken household items and for constructing basic items of furniture. Now such tools feel as though they may be on the brink of extinction as people no longer fix things and as what tools there still are tend to be power tools which lack the simple physicality of hand tools
Steel pliers, ceramic head, magnet. 15x15x1cm August 2024
An anthropomorphic sculpture composed of a pair of pliers to which a ceramic head has been attached.
I made the head about thirty years ago in around 1994.
I call the piece Homo Habilis after the extinct species of human that lived in Eastern and Southern Africa about two million years ago. Homo Habilis literally means Handy Man, which in my piece nicely links to the handyman’s tool, the pliers. Homo Habilis is also referred to as ‘Man the Toolmaker’, which links equally nicely with the piece.
Pliers, wood, paper, acrylic. August 2024. 335x335x30mm
A pair of workman’s pliers mounted on coloured paper with three painted hemispheres of wood attached.
To me the pliers have a pleasing anthropomorphic appearance, with their handles resembling legs (here dressed in brightly coloured trousers or stockings).
The three hemispheres disrupt the shape of the pliers, visually separating the jaws at the top of the tool from the base. This is reinforced by the fact that these particular pliers have brightly coloured plastic on the handles (the trousers) which are there to insulate the user of the pliers from any accidental contact with live electricity.
The use of handyman’s or workman’s tools such as hammers, pliers and spanners is a recurring theme in my work.
