SCULPTURAL OBJECTS

The Kicker series grew out of the World Championships installation and from an ongoing interest in football as a visual and social structure. At first, the work moved into painting. Seen from above, the football field became less a place of sport than a green surface crossed by white markings, a diagram, a game board, a system of rules.

I began to introduce players in altered forms. Chess pieces, yellow plastic bath ducks, and later other small figures. These substitutions shifted the field away from realism and towards play, absurdity and theatre. The game remained recognisable, but its authority became unstable.

This then led to full-scale kicker works that could still function as games, but with the usual players replaced. In one version, forks played against spoons. In another, carved and modelled moorhens took the place of the footballers, reversing the black-and-white colour scheme of the familiar table-football figures. A further version used the yellow bath ducks.

Although they began with the logic of a game table, the works gradually left the horizontal plane. Like the kayak pieces, they became stronger when lifted, hung or seen vertically. The field no longer simply carried a game; it became an object on the wall, held between sport, sculpture, play and a quiet absurdity.