Serendipity can be the mother of persistence. I’d left the shadows behind until I came across a roll of self adhesive silver foil in a drawer and immediately thought of making a very different kind of void from my parade of absences. Reflective ones would be full of images but none of them their own.

My first thought is I want those leggings. My second is to get back to the script.

I made these using the device of reflective paper with a sticky back. This peels off but first I drew two shadows onto the paper and cut round them to make the silhouettes which I stuck onto the A1 cartridge paper. The surface of the reflective side is covered with a blue film which also peels off and I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to strip that film back to its basics and watch it capturing fleeting images.

The first set of images is of the silhouettes on unpainted cartridge and the next after a coat of Payne’s grey that also covered the reflective surfaces. The patterns come from selective scrubbing of those surfaces to expose them and the reflected images of me taking the photos. Interactions between those two elements give rise to an almost inexhaustible source of shapes, colours, and patterns as every tiny adjustment of anything at all pertaining to those images changes what appears on the surfaces. The textures in the dilute paint on the reflective surfaces themselves are made by lightly scrubbing (on the left) or making linear scratches (on the right) with a rough cloth.

Animation video made in MotionLeap.

(c) SCH 2025