A study of reflections in a sphere. A steel ball placed on a sketch pad in the centre of a radiating vein-like pattern. The reflections in the sphere give the effect of an eye-like form. The work can be thought of as a study for a floor-based sculpture with a large steel sphere placed on a floor onto which the radiating vein-like lines are applied. It works very well at a small scale however, with the steel ball approximately the same size as a human eye. The intimate size of the small version makes this version quite unsettling, while a larger version would possibly be less unsettling but more visually intriguing (because the reflections in the ball wouldn’t invoke so precisely a human eye). The initial concept came to me while working on a different project involving a steel ball (but not reflections) on a sheet of paper. I noticed that the reflection of the white paper and the room on the ball gave the impression of the white of an eye and the iris of the eye.
A close-up of the steel sphere, showing the reflection from the sideThe sketch on the sketchpad, with the steel ball reflecting the pad and the room
In this work I’ve created a chess set out of short blocks of wood. The first thing that the viewer notices when looking at the work is that the chess board is fragmenting or disintegrating. Less obvious however is the fact that the chess board is composed only of the white squares. These white squares are the tops of blocks of wood, the sides of which are painted black. It is the black sides of the blocks that give the impression of the black squares of the chess board. The seeming existence of the black squares is a visual illusion, as they are nothing more than black holes. See the photograph below. The illusion is as true with the actual, three dimensional chess set as it is with these photographs. A large number of viewers of the work don’t notice that the black squares are an illusion. Part of the impact of the piece is in the way that the viewer only notices the ‘black holes’ of the missing black squares on the chess board after already being intrigued by the disintegrating nature of the board. The piece has political overtones, in that it is partly about the disintegration of power (as symbolised by the combative nature of the game of chess) and the disintegration of order (as symbolised by the rigid grid of the chess board). It is also about more existentialist themes such as dangers that lurk in the world (the black holes as traps or stumbling blocks) and the nature of physical reality (with the holes representing the unknown parts of the physical universe (such as the actual black holes that result from collapsed stars). It’s also just a nice visual illusion, and thus contains humor as well as its more weighty themes.
The chess board contains no black squares – they are an illusion.
Slightly unsettling heads created from empty plastic milk bottles.
Like many artists I have a habit of collecting waste and recycling it into works of art. The slightly sinister appearance of these heads, drawn as they are on post-consumer waste in the form of discarded plastic milk bottles, can be interpreted as a comment on the fact that we as humans are destroying the environment through (amongst other things) our profligate use of plastic packaging (I’ve been producinng work connserned with environmental issues since the 1970s). The fact that the heads also resemble the type of craft-play objects produced by children can be interpreted as alluding to the western world’s current tendency towards a philosophy of consequence-denying pleasure seeking in which the adults in society fail to take responsibility for their actions beyond immediate self-gratification.
A small paper sculpture of an abstract form in primary colours created from folded and coloured watercolour paper.
Contemporary paper sculptures are frequently very intricate, often featuring frill-like or fringe-like elements. My own works in this medium tend towards the more minimal end of the spectrum. There’s often a nod towards constructivist art. The fact that the sculptures are made of paper or card gives them a sense of fragility or vulnerability. Along with this, the fact that they look as though they may be made of cut pieces of metal sheeting rather than paper gives them an ambiguous quality of robustness. Most paper sculpture unambiguously exploits the fragility evident in the sculptures.
A photograph of a natural granite rock formation with a drawing of a fin-like object added to the photograph as though it is attached to the rock. The rock formation in the photograph is on the Penwith peninsula in west Cornwall, a few miles from St Ives. The large rock on which the fin is drawn is a rocking stone, known locally as a Logan stone. The stone is said to move slightly when pushed correctly. The image is a finished artwork, despite the fact that it resembles a concept study for a sculpture in the landscape. The drawing of the fin is deliberately inconsistent in terms of photographic realism with the rest of the image. Having said that, I’m not ruling out the possibility of an actual sculpture.
A visualisation of a concept for a sculpture in the landscape. The landscape in the photograph is the Penwith peninsula in west Cornwall. The hammers are meant to project a sense of overbearing force, the fact that there are several of them possibly implying organised force (such as military force). Hammers, to me, have a certain anthropomorphic quality to them, suggesting a degree of human identity – a long thin body with a head at the top. The blank facelessness of the heads of the hammers in this image suggest a mindless power (I’ve done other works in which hammers have faces).
Wood, acrylic. Zennor Hill, Cornwall, UK. June 2018
One of my temporary sculptural works or interventions in the landscape near St Ives, Cornwall.
There’s a tendency for land art to be either very ephemeral and transient (such as Andy Goldsworthy’s work with leaves) or very permanent (such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty). The photo below shows my work becoming very ephemeral indeed by floating up off the ground as if defying gravity. The photo was achieved by taking several photos of the wooden batons being held in the air and then photoshopping the holder of the batons out of the picture.
Land art also has a tendency to involve circles, probably because of the circle’s links to some spiritual concepts (such as the circle of life, yin and yang, the cosmos etc). Spirals and other sinuous or organic forms are also common for similar reasons. I’ve chosen to go the other way with this work, employing very mechanical straight lines (as a comment on the common phrase “There are no straight lines in nature”) and primary colours that in nature are normally only seen in small concentrated quantities in such places as flowers and birds’ feathers.
Wood and acrylic paint. Land art on Zennor Hill, near St Ives, Cornwall. 25th June 2018
Land art sculpture composed of lengths of painted wood battens (the type of wood commonly used in building construction). The sculpture was created by positioning a small number of battens in the landscape, photographing them, repositioning them, rephotographing them and then merging the photographs. As a result the work has an interesting relationship with time. The sculpture never existed in its entirety as depicted in the photograph, each batten only being in position for long enough to take a photograph. The sculpture only takes on its final form when the twenty-five minutes that it took to position and photograph the battens are compressed into a single instant.
A work of transient land art near St Ives,Cornwall: an intervention in the landscape, or art in the environment. The wood battens are about a metre long.
Surrealist photomontage – wellington boots with arms
Photomontage. June 2018
A photomontage showing arms emerging from the tops of a pair of wellington boots. The arms are sinking down into the boots, as though the footware is devouring the owner of the arms. The theme of predatory footwear is one that I’ve explored several times over the past few decades. Another example can be seen here – shoes with teeth. Or are the arms emerging from the boots? An example of ambiguity in art. This photomontage was created while I was exploring various options for creating a sculpture that included wellington boots. I feel that these boots have a strong sculptural presence, and I’m quite surprised how under-represented they are in the field of sculpture. The image, which I think probably falls into the category of contemporary surrealism, is meant to be both humorous and unsettling.
Sculpture involving light through a translucent sphere
199. 10x10x20cm
An abstract sculpture exploring the effects of light using a translucent resin sphere on the top of a marble column. In the photograph the sculpture is positioned on a slate base against a rough painted granite wall to give the work a robust organic feel.
A surreal or dada found object sculpture made from a cobbler’s shoe last with a cigarette inserted into the circular hole in the last that is designed to accommodate a handle. The last is mounted on a lamp stand.
The sculpture utilises the human sensory condition known as pareidolia, the interpretation of shapes as human faces, to create a surreal head. Pareidolia is essential for the interpretation of a lot of art, especially art in which faces are merely suggested by, say, a few strokes of a paintbrush. In some art pareidolia is actually a curse though – think of the number of abstract images that are ruined when you see an unintentional face in them. The sculpture’s title, Last Cigarette, utilises the human tendency to reinterpret words to create puns – in this case the word ‘last’ referring to the wooden cobbler’s last, meaning that the cigarette is the last’s last cigarette.
A small abstract contemporary sculpture created by casting the interior of a coffee filter cone. The work is deliberately created in a slightly crude style (notice the imperfections in the base).
The sculpture is painted in bright colourful primary colours, with the main surface of the sculpture painted blue while. he grooves in the sculpture (created by the ridges in the coffee filter cone) are in red or yellow (with a couple of white ones too).
The sculpture has an overall positive feel to it, caused partly by the bright colours and partly by the simple conical shape with its grooves.
It’s hard to tell how big this sculpture is from this photograph.
It could be a couple of metres tall. In fact it’s closer to five centimetres, as the piece is created from lengths of 2×2 wood (two inches by two inches). The work has a strange relationship with scale. It’s small, but it could be big.
At it’s actual size this sculpture looks as though it’s happy at the size that it is, while somehow containing the spirit of a larger sculpture within itself. In some ways it gives the impression of being a large object that is somehow being perceived as being small, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
As I mentioned, this work is composed of two pieces of two by two wood. This is a common size of wood sold in long lengths in timber yards for use in general construction projects. This sculpture came about when I picked up two short offcuts of wood from a different project, that each had been cut at 45 degrees at one end, and placed them on a work surface on their angled faces. They instantly acquired a dynamic and vital presence. Due to the manner in which they rested at an angle each piece looked as though it was embedded in the surface with part of its form submerged.
One of the things I like about this work is that it is made from extremely simple components – two pieces of wood from a builders’ merchants and a bit of red and blue acrylic paint. Yet it doesn’t look like a work created in the spirit of found objects or ‘detritus art’ in which the work is often deliberately engineered to emphasise its origins in the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary consumer culture (Artists such as Philidda Barlow, whose work I like greatly, and Abraham Cruzvillegas come to mind as good exponents of this genre). The bright red and blue primary colours of the sculpture help, as found object sculpture is often the colour of rubbish. In fact this sculpture could almost be mistaken for a tiny example of the highly engineered works that are quite common in modernist sculpture.
Wood, ceramic, acrylic paint Height 12cm August 2017
A sculpture composed of four identically shaped, differently coloured blocks of wood mounted on two ceramic tiles. The wood blocks are set at an angle to the vertical to give the impression that they may be partly concealed within the base on which they stand. The work is deliberately made from mundane material at a small scale which gives the work a surprising intimacy.
The piece is composed of scrap material that has been recycled or upcycled to create the artwork. It is no doubt influenced by the Arte Povera movement which used discarded artefacts to construct artworks. It is also influenced by the current awareness of environmental issues and the problems posed by consumer waste.
Colour Discontinuity 3 – the illusion of continuity
Front surface mirror, wood, acrylic. March 2017 20x20x14cm
A colored rod reflected in a mirror, positioned so that the reflection of the rod coincides with another rod of a different color on the other side of the mirror, creating an ambiguous optical effect.
A study of ambiguous visual stimuli to question the nature of perception and the interpretation of reality through the visual illusion of continuity.
The work is quite small and is intended to be viewed close up. Because of this the mirror used is a front surfce mirror (or first surface mirror), which is a mirror that is coated on the front rather than the back. As a result there are no ghost reflections caused by the thickness of the glass.
I’ve worked with mirrors since I was a teenager in the late 1960s, when I ground the parabolic mirror for an astronomical telescope that I’d constructed. I got it coated by Grubb Parsons, a telescope manufacturing company that constructed seriously large telescopes including the Isaac Newton telescope and the William Herschel telescope. I used that mirror in one of my early mirror art experiments in about 1970.
Environmental contemporary art – the Earth in a kitchen waste bin.
Kitchen waste bin, digital display. January 2017, Cornwall.
This is an example of my work on environmental issues such as global warming and climate change. This sculpture addresses the issues of over-consumption, environmental degradation and waste. I have been creating work about the state of the natural world and the environment since the 1970s.
From most angles (as in the image on the left, above) the bin looks like any conventional kitchen bin: however when viewed from the front (the image on the right, above) the opening in the bin is transformed into a portal to the cosmos, with the Earth suspended in the darkness of outer space.
The inside of the bin is pitch black due to the use of extremely matt black paint, while the Earth shines as a back-lit image.
The work carries the environmental message that the human race is treating the earth with contempt and that we are effectively placing the planet itself in the rubbish bin.
The work is a development of a concept that I had in about the year 2000, when I produced several environment-themed drawings of the earth falling into a wastepaper basket. The sculptural potential of using a real rubbish bin to create an illusion of outer space is a more recent development.
A version of this work was shown in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the same year.
Below is a video of the work showing the dramatic optical illusion effect of the work which can only be appreciated in three dimensions of on video.
A study for a surreal work composed of a pair of shoes with mouths and teeth. The teeth in this study were added digitally. These particular shoes were chosen partly because the holes at the toe end of the shoes give the impression of eyes. An unsettling aspect of this concept is that it is normal for a person to put their feet into shoes – however these shoes look as though they would devour anything that was placed in their ‘mouths’. They are almost lying in wait for feet to be placed inside them. This work may be interpreted as being a metaphor for the manner in which consumerism devours people (especially via the connsumerism of clothing and fashion). I thought of the concept of carnivorous shoes that devour their wearer many years ago and drew it as a sketch. It’s currently misplaced in my studio so I’m not sure of the year.
Study for a proposed sculpture. Photograph of a barograph, digital manipulation. January 2017
A photograph of a barograph digitally altered so that the arm of the barograph appears to be creating a fine pen and ink drawing of a landscape. A barograph normally draws a graph recording air pressure over the course of time on a sheet of graph paper attached to a rotating drum. This barograph is in the spirit of surrealism and dada – it is a scientific instrument appropriated for the purposes of art (In C P Snow’s two cultures thesis this would possibly count as cultural appropriation).
Mirrors, cord and light source: January 2017. W=30cm H=30cm
A study for a work composed of mirrors that are configured so that they create reflections round a symmetrical axis and also create reflections in infinite regression. The reflected object in this work is a single short length of coloured cord (about 40cm long), made to appear much longer by the multiple reflections in the mirrors. The cord is brightly coloured and is lit by a directional light source which gives the cord the effect of being a pulsating energy stream in a containment vessel, perhaps in a high energy physics laboratory. This work brings together my interests in art and science, especially the science of optics and perception.
A pair of shoes reflected in a mirror, with the shoes positioned so that the reflection of the shoe in the mirror coincides exactly with the other shoe on the opposite side of the mirror, thus optically merging the real shoe with the reflection of the other shoe. Like a lot of my works that involves optical illusion and perception this one explores the line between reality and our interpretation of what we perceive. It also links art with humour – humour being an interesting psychological interpretation of the world.
