I tried to re-create a neon sign as faithfully as I could using just paint. I love the paradox of neon’s nature as a simultaneously loud and seductive medium for information and advertising. It’s in the air we breathe, and the universe is swimming in the stuff. But add an electrical charge to it and you have a visual feast on your hands. Elementally it’s a creative person’s dream. It stirs up the imagination and makes me want to create. For me neon is the most magical, mysterious, creative and iconic of all the periodic table’s elements.
My piece is fairly cryptic, I admit. The name cobalt comes from the original German name kobold ore, which means goblin ore. Apparently, when smelted by early German miners, it turned to arsenic and killed said smelters. So it had a nasty reputation. And, in its un-messed-with state, it’s a metallic grey. And cobalt is used to make stuff blue. So, a blue, goblin hand forming from grey metal, aggressively reaching out, was the obvious choice. I think.
This photograph was taken at the end of the hottest day of the year in Philadelphia last June at a renegade skate park beneath the FDR freeway. It’s part of a new project I am working on about the people and architecture of DIY skateboard spots worldwide. Growing up skateboarding led to me discovering photography, so it feels really right after all this time to be back documenting a subculture that was essentially my first real subject matter. The element assigned to me for the exhibition was tin, so I immediately thought of these punk girls drinking cold tins of Colt 45.
This celebrates copper’s amazing usefulness, when made into wire and wound in a coil, in converting magnetic fields and electric currents. My interest was piqued by Neolithic stone spheres found with grooves laboriously cut in geometric patterns, but which have no known purpose. It looked like they were designed to have coils of wire wound in the grooves and that that would have some function. But I couldn’t see exactly what. Then, at a meeting of an art/science group, I showed it to a young physicist, and he said, ‘Of course, it’s a motor.’ And I hadn’t realised it. So, for this show, I’ve made an “experimental Stone Age motor”, and though mine can’t drive itself yet, I think I will get it to work.
I chose xenon as my element for the show as I had an idea that it was xenon gas that was used in neon, until someone pointed out that neon is used in neon. After doing some research on this noble gas I discovered there are deep-sea creatures known as xenon bulb fish, so called because of their remarkable likeness to the common xenon bulbs used in Imax film projectors. This is my interpretation of the fish.
There was really only one element I wanted to work on: it had to be krypton. As an illustrator the iconic image of Superman struggling against a lump of kryptonite, the rock form of the radioactive element found on Supermans home planet of Krypton, immediately sprang to mind. I based the image on a famous 1950s comic strip of Superman and his Achilles’ heel.
Boiling metal in my neighbour’s kitchen was my first introduction to alchemy. We may have merely been moulding weights for hook-and-line-related pursuits, but unbeknown to us this simple scientific process was the base ingredient of Japanese-style face-whitening foundation.
Venetian ceruse gave birth to a toxic cosmetic regime that inevitably led to a loss of teeth, yellowing of skin and, most drastically, death.
Lead us pray.
On the wall in chemistry class at school hung the periodic table. Not being the most chemistry-inclined of students, my eye would wander to this chart, and I would mentally rearrange the letters of the elements into different words. This exhibition was an opportunity to realise my schoolboy game, and what better form for it to take than Scrabble? I printed out the table, cut out each individual element and commandeered the kitchen table for three days playing elemental Scrabble. I would appeal to any Scrabble fans not to scrutinise my spelling too closely.
The shot was taken on the site of a gold exploration project 10 miles outside the town of Quinchia, Colombia. Hundreds of locals, packs of dogs and some schools are being relocated for the find through a new social-and-environmental mining method. This local boy was playing in the school ground; when I talked to him I found out that he had graffitied the dog with a marker so that he wouldn’t lose the little guy in the move.