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.
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.
An example of the same concept by different artists.
Drawing. 2019. Photo: Harrison and Wood, Frieze, London. 2022
An example of different artists thinking of the same idea independently. My cartoon drawing is a joke about text-based art from a book of cartoons that I produced on the subject of contemporary art and humour in 2019 ( See here ). The photograph is of a sculptural text-based work by Harrison and Wood that was exhibited at Frieze London in 2022.
Card, acrylic paint, LED light source. 30x15x20cm. 2022.
A light source shining on painted and folded card cut-outs in the form of rings. The shadows cast by the light shining on the rings form in conjunction with the card full rings on the base of the artwork. The video above shows the light turning on and off to show the effect. An example of contemporary light sculpture. The piece is deliberately low-tech, using a cheap commercial table lamp as a light source and simple folded card.
A sculptural piece consisting of toy plastic hands ( sometimes known as finger hands) attached to wooden spheres. The hands are almost the only anatomical feature possessed by the spheres. This makes their function ambiguous – are they actually hands, or are they feet?Or even wings? The ‘creatures’ in the procession are quite unsettling. Their lack of anatomical features other than hands gives them the impression that they are crawling clumsily and blindly forward. Other artworks in this series feature these objects suspended by thread on a mobile. In these works the hands unmistakably also function as wings. In the natural world the wings of birds and bats have evolved from hands (or front feet, which are what hands have evolved from), so the idea of hands being used as wings is far from far-fetched. This work is partly inspired by my interest in evolutionary science and the natural world, and partly by my interest in the bizarre and the ambiguous.
The Oppressor Impaled by the Oppressed. Hammer and nails sculpture.
Hammer, nails. This version, May 2022. Original concept, 2010.
This sculpture is partly a metaphor for oppression and rebellion. The work shows a hammer nailed to a surface by nails. Part of the concept behind the sculpture is that the hammer is being impaled by the objects that it normally hits. How did the nails manage to impale the hammer? Were the nails hammered into the hammer by another hammer? In that case the nails are not necessarily a metaphor for the oppressed rising up to overthrow 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’s been overthrown. The use of handyman’s tools such as hammers, pliers and spanners is a recurring feature of my artwork.
The work in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, 2022
Metamorphosis (from pie containers to insect larvae)
Wood (recycled food containers). 2021.
An assemblage or sculpture fabricated from recycled wooden pie containers. The pie containers, for Charlie Bigham pies (mainly fish pies with the odd cauliflower cheese in there), are stacked as curved forms suggestive of insect larvae such as caterpillars or grubs. Insect larvae undergo metamorphosis when they change into the imago or mature form of the insect. Here the pie containers have undergone a similar metamorphosis by turning into the insect larvae.
This work reflects my interest in the natural world and the environment, as well as my concerns for environmental issues caused by human activity (this work being an example of recycling or upcycling of consumer waste). An example of art made from scrap material. A form of arte povera perhaps.
A sculpture or assemblage composed of G clamps. G clamps are usually used for holding work together temporarily, such as when components are being glued together. Here the G clamps are holding on to each other so that they are part of a structure themselves rather than an instrument for creating a structure. The angle of the piece gives the structure a feeling of instability. This could have allusions to the instability of the modern world that we have constructed through our use of industry and technology, where the very means by which we have constructed our world leads to its inherent precariousness, especially now that we are inflicting such serious damage on the environment.
A sculpture fabricated from expanded polystyrene packaging – an example of upcycled art. Upcycling, or the repurposing of waste or redundant material, is a common phenomenon in art, especially recently since the rise of environmentally orientated art or eco art (and the invention of the word upcycling). Of course the practice is probably as old as art itself. I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice the sculptural qualities of pieces of polystyrene packaging.
I call the work Polystyrene Idol because the shapes of the polystyrene in the piece are suggestive of the carved idols of some cultures. In the context of Western culture such an idol may be seen as an idol linked to the cult of consumerism, especially because the polystyrene is the material that protects consumer goods when they are in trannsit, and it is also the discarded waste material once the consumer goods have been acquired by the purchaser.
G clamp, nails, wooden sphere. 20 x 20 x 15cm. 2022.
This sculpture or assemblage is almost an accidental artwork. The nails in the sphere were put there to attach other objects to. The G clamp is there to hold the two halves of the sphere together (It’s composed of two hemispheres glued together. One of the skills needed in art is the ability to see the unexpected.
An assemblage of blocks of wood painted very matte black on the sides and bright white on the top, positioned so that they almost suggest a formation, but not quite. Developed from a chess piece that I created, in which similar blocks formed a more regular chess board formation. This photo was taken at my solo show in the gallery at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall.
A sculpture constructed from vinyl records. The star-shaped object at the top of the tower, which looks like a radio transmitter, is composed of pawns from a chess set (a recurring theme in my work).
The work in my solo exhibition at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance, Cornwall. May – June 2022
There’s another work composed of vinyl records here.
12 inch vinyl records Dimensions variable May 2022
A sculptural work composed of a number of 12 inch vinyl LP records arranged on the floor. The records are placed on blocks to hold them above the floor.
These photos were taken at my solo exhibition at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, in 2022.
Part of the appeal of this work, to me, is in the fact that the vinyl records of which it is composed are ruthlessly precise and austere in their physical presence – perfect discs of shiny black plastic – but that they contain in themselves the information for producing music, perhaps the most ethereal of art forms. The manner in which the discs seem to hover above the ground seems to link the physical nature of the records with the floating, insubstantial nature of music. The physical delicacy of the analogue information storage system which contains the information about the music on the disks (the grooves) is also significant.
There’s another work composed of vinyl records here.
A polished steel sphere reflecting its surroundings
Steel sphere 2cm diameter 2022
The contents of this image are quite hard to decipher, which is part of the subject of the image and part of its appeal.
The spherical form at the centre of the image is a small steel ball approximately two centimetres in diameter. The dark form reflected in the sphere is me and my camera: you can easily identify my arm and hand waving in the air and you can also make out the camera (looking very large due to distortion in the sphere) with my other hand holding it.
The sphere appears to be resting in a depression in snow but it is actually resting in a drainage hole in the white concrete seating inside the James Turrell Sky Space in Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, UK. The light ellipse on the sphere is the actual aperture in the Sky Space. It was a cloudy day. If it had been sunny the ellipse would have been blue.
One of the things that I find appealing about this image is that it combines my very modest work (in the form of a small reflective steel sphere) with a very large scale and high concept work by a hugely important artist.
The steel sphere was originally a component in a Newton’s cradle ‘executive toy’.
Mirror steel spheres are relatively common in sculpture that explores reflections. It’s hardly surprising, because in its simplicity the sphere itself is such a perfect three dimensional form. The highly distorted reflections generated by such a simple form are just too appealing for words. You can’t go wrong with mirror steel spheres!
Some of my work on display in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, in 2022.
The abstract paintings are from a series of gouache and acrylic works on paper featuring simple geometric forms in flat colours. The works are all linked by, amongst other things, the use of the curved shapes with bulbous ends that exhibit an unusual organic quality.
The three works displayed below the paintings are all sculptural works that feature mirrors.
An assemblage composed of a kitchen sieve placed in front of an old framed mirror. The reflection of the mesh of the sieve in the mirror creates interesting Moiré fringes as it interacts with the actual mesh.
When a person looks at their reflection in the mirror through the mesh of the sieve the observer experiences a degree of psychological distancing from their reflected self, almost as though the reflected person is in a strange cage.
