Time Machine [July 2009]

Watch parts, ball bearings, record player tonearm pivot, glass lenses, hematite, camera part

Recently my partner Rachel bought me a wonderful book, filled with full page pictures of the mechanisms inside very high end wristwatches. Absolutely stunning, complex and beautiful. not to mention inspirational.

So I got hold of a bunch of old wind-up watch mechanisms and have been playing around with them in my work. both sides of this mechanism were nice, so I decided to put glass on both faces of the piece.


The outer aluminium case is the tonearm pivot from an old record player - it turned up by chance at exactly the right time and was a perfect fit. The most difficult and time consuming part of this piece was the hanger - I ended up cutting a slot in one of the grub screws from the pivot, inserting the camera part, cross drilling a hole through both, and machining up a tiny brass rivet to go through the hole and hold it all together. This assembly was then screwed into the original threaded hole in the pivot.



Gaze [Jan 2006]

sewing machine tension disc, hematite, brass, spring, video recorder part

This very simple piece came about as a result of finding an old sewing machine by the side of the road.  It came together very quickly.  The striations in the inner part of the tension disc immediately suggested an iris, so all I needed to do was add a pupil.


Nothing Lasts, but Nothing is Lost [July 2005]

mother of pearl, lens, aluminium ring, text on paper, found bottlecap

My mother has this piece.

Things that might be considered ugly bits of mass produced consumer waste such as bottletops are transformed into things that can be considered beautiful, by nothing more than being present in a dynamic environment.

In this case - by being run over by thousands of cars - squashed flat, worn and polished by the endless stream of car tyres.

Everything is always changing, but what something is now affects what it will be. Its past as a bottletop is still visible.