Anyone for Tennis?

The Seven Ages of Man, 2010, artist's hair on tennis balls.

At last after a few years of squint and tweezers I have assembled, like the notes of an octave, a set of seven well-tempered tennis balls. They are meant to match Shakespeare's seven ages of man. A lawn-green stand (crafted by MDM) serves as their support.

The strokes of time are measured in the deciduous changes of my own hair applied to shaved tennis balls. They register the passing years by one of those annual markers like Easter or the Lord's Test Match, in this case the great tennis fixture of the summer in South London. A distorted line, again from Shakespeare, echoes in my head... and all our Wimbledons have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Magnificent but cheerless. Perhaps I should have settled for T.S. Eliot's finer scale... I have measured out my life in Wimbledons.

It is an enigmatic object seen as a whole and certainly speaks of something. If I completely knew what it said it would not then have been something worth saying. Such is art.

See it at Flowers Gallery, W 20th St., New York from October 7th (Private view 6-8pm).

This is not the end of hair however. I'm still growing the stuff. One of my dreams has been to make a hat out of my own hair, a fine chapeau d'artiste, or elegant fedora. What better headgear in the event of baldness than a homegrown hat replacing absent hair with its past self. Now that dream has come a little nearer... (to be continued).

Grafton Street

Preliminary study for section of railings in Grafton Street. 2009.

I have been designing some railings for a building in Mayfair which is having, in the fusion fashion of the times, a facade-lift after major internal surgery.

Good to be working with responsive people at Futurecity at the ideas end of the project, and, for the actual making, with the grand art fabricators MDM who are conveniently near to me in Loughborough Junction.

Although I do not often plan to be a player in the supersizing of art I enjoy, for the moment, sharing factory space with colleagues such as Richard Wilson and Anish Kapoor who work on an epic scale.

The railings which extend across eighteen metres consist of conventional strutting in the vernacular of the local streets with ornamental interventions in which the regular elements suddenly go for a walk. Somehow here there is an echo of the florid bursts in baroque music that interrupt a steady beat of rhythmic passage work.

Final drawings for the ornamental sections.