In Prickly Cones, Alex Buckingham isolates a single form — the ice-cream cone — and reconfigures it through colour, repetition and subtle transformation. Each work presents a cactus poised atop a wafer cone, set against a field of saturated colour.

Playful yet precise, the series explores surface, artifice and display. The familiar language of commercial imagery is repurposed, shifting the object from novelty to constructed icon. Through serial variation, difference becomes the point of focus.

CREDITS

Artist
Alex Buckingham

Exhibition
Online Viewing Room Prickly Cones

Medium
Archival pigment inkjet prints

Enquiries
Pricing and availability on request via Maud Gallery. Please quote the artwork title.

Prickly Cones extends Buckingham’s investigation into perception and surface within constructed image-making. Working in the studio, he collapses distinctions between product photography, pop culture and fine-art typology.

The cone — a universally recognisable symbol of consumption and pleasure — becomes an architectural base for a living form. Buckingham pairs rigid geometry with organic irregularity, setting up a tension between control and unpredictability. Colour functions not as background but as a spatial device, flattening depth and heightening the object’s graphic presence.

Presented as a series, the works resist singular hierarchy. Meaning emerges through repetition and variation, where subtle shifts in form, hue and texture invite prolonged looking.