A beautiful piece of home made hi fi.

Charlie Bosanquet was doing a curators residency at PSsquared at the same time as my project, so she had time to really consider what to bring me. In the end she handed in a beautiful old speaker she had found in a skip, obviously home made, and with a great degree of love. I particularly found the contrast between the roughly sawed corners and the carefully jig-sawed decorative opening in front appealing. What immediately struck me about it was it’s box like quality, which I wanted to keep.

almost a little bit like a Chinese lacquer box.

Given that Charlie herself is a very talented artisan and artist maker, who specializes in containers ( belfastpuncture.com ) made from up-cycled materials, I wanted this box to reflect her taste for refining the rough. Obviously, this very taste of hers also led her to pick up this old speaker and hand it in to me.

The blue transparency both hides and reveals.

Breaking open the speaker to refurbish it, I came across it’s heart so to speak, a large, solid magnet in the shape of a big squarish ring. This magnet of course, now that it can’t play music any more, is the perfect keeper and transmitter of secrets. The idea of hiding a secret in the box, a bit like a heart, or a core that only reveals itself to the knowing, struck a chord with me. I broke up the magnet in pieces, and rearranged them, then cast them into a concrete slab, which became the bottom of the box. I carefully filled and sanded the surface of the slab, so that the hidden magnet became completely invisible.

Why such a solid bottom for a wooden box?

The only way to figure out now, what was up with this box with it’s heavy, solid bottom, would be to find the magnetic field captured in it. Which is very easy if you know what you are looking for, but not very obvious otherwise.

Revealed by iron filings on a piece of paper.

Object 16

A cheap instrument becomes more of decorative prop.

Daniel Jewesbury gave me a mandolin of his to repair. Strictly speaking it wasn’t broken, it was just bad quality. The problem was that it was impossible to tune properly. Either he could get the high notes right, or the low ones, but not all at the same time, which of course makes it sort of useless. This got me thinking about how instruments often act as decorative statements, or accessories. It doesn’t matter that the mandolin standing in a corner in the sitting room is unplayable, when guests see it, they know this to be the home of musical people. But couldn’t the unplayable instrument at least be given n additional function, since it’s just standing there?

A very discrete text on the side is the only visible change.

I wanted to add a function, that was simple, that didn’t alter the exterior of the instrument, and that would also act more as a possibility, than something actually being used. The image of clowns smashing instruments over each others heads came to me, the cliché of splinters and dust flying and the impact of the light weight instrument being so flimsy as to act almost as a slap or insult rather than a real attack. Maybe this image is so well imprinted also in other peoples memories, that if you surprised a burglar in your house, and came at him with a raised mandolin, he would just disregard it and take the blow expecting it to just splinter off his thick skull. This could be taken advantage of, by clever double crossing. I filled the body of the mandolin with cast concrete, so that it now, still invisible from the outside, became a most formidable instrument of destruction. Anyone hit over the head with this instrument would likely visit the hospital afterwards, or more likely, the morgue. Considering that northern Belfast, where Daniel lives, has it’s reputation as a rough place, I found it very suitable, and also given that Daniel is more of the sophisticated gentleman and academic than the ruffian, I think it appropriate that he would go into battle swinging a mandolin if any blunt instrument.

Only the weight tells the difference.

object no. 40

The moment I saw the modern steam iron Eamonn Magee brought in I knew what it had to be. Some objects suggest their future form before any thoughts or reasoning has time to enter into the process, almost as if they knew it themselves, and just need to tell me.

doesn't look like a monument of the industrial age, but it is

The shape was is the design of the lower steam generating body of the iron. Personally I can’t understand how anyone can use the iron without seeing the angry God hiding inside it, but then again, an iron is such a mundane and practical objects that most people wouldn’t look for faces in it.

but why is he angry?

Erecting the numerous, very imposing stone Moai along their coastline finally broke the spine of the ancient Easter Island economy after a long period of  growth and expansion. As beautifully described by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, it is likely that the Easter islanders killed themselves off with their excessive statue building, cutting down the precious few trees on the island to make rollers for transporting the heavy stone Moai from the quarry to the coast. Surely they were not aware of what they were doing to themselves. Cutting down a few trees to roll the first statue down to the sea can’t have seemed particularly wasteful, and when they cut down the very last tree for the same purpose, they had slowly gotten used to an environment with many statues but with fewer trees, and probably never thought much of it. It was their doom however, as fertile top soil eroded away without the protection of tree roots, and their agricultural economy collapsed into starvation, war and cannibalism. Are we going the same way? Are all the practical plastic apparatuses we surround ourselves with our very own Moai? Will future archaeologists be baffled by a people who replaced their natural living environment with heaps of infertile rubbish, or will we change before it’s too late this time?

the face of our true God?

Object no. 39

serious misuse

Willie Heron, metal workshop technician at the Ulster University art school, was baffled how the students could break even such a strong well-made tool, but if you repeatedly miss your work piece with the hammer head, and instead slams it with the handle, I guess that’s possible. As a response to a very real problem I wanted to supply a real solution. My answer was the Trainee Hammer, with two handles, which allows the technician to guide new users of hammers in their first couple of (or many) swings, until they get the handle of how to do it.

two steady grips are better than one

The idea is that the teacher grabs the left handle and help steer the student right until he or she get it right. It can of course also be used as a recourse whenever supposedly experienced students mishandle equipment in their care. The possibility of such an embarrassing step back to the basics might even motivate students to use their entrusted tools with more care.

more a suggestive instrument of education than a useful tool

Object no 22

fits nicely in the palm

The mobile phone I got from Maureen Martin had a nice natural quality to it, almost like if it was a seed pod or nut, or a stone polished by the sea, rather than a high-tech gadget. I wanted to take advantage of this natural beauty of the object, while retaining the corrupting and addictive qualities of modern communications. I decided to make a metaphor with mimicry in nature, to suggest the sticky hiding in the smooth and shiny.

sensitive antennas always aware

One of the nicest qualities of this mobile phone was the way it unfolded, snapping up decisively but smoothly, held shut by a magnet and not by some clunky plastic lock. I found the opening and closing of the pebble seductive, but can you really trust an object that tries to seduce you? It made me think of William S. Burroughs literary love for roaches and bugs, and things that are not what they seem.

the innards of nature are even more complicated than the hearts of technology

Object no. 34

two broken decorative objects

Linda McBurney handed in two objects that in my opinion had a lot in common. The solid wooden lamp holder had been purchased on a trip to Malaysia and had now lost a small wooden chip at it’s base. The amber and silver necklace was from Lithuania, and had gotten tangled up and warped when it got stuck in something and pulled. Both were decorative, made of local materials by local craftsmen, and served as memories of journeys. Since they were both broken, I found it suitable to turn them into a device for guiding travellers along the safe path.

The amber doesn't shine very bright, but lasts for a very long time.

Objects no. 27 & 28

Found in Anne Marie's studio

Anne Marie actually pulled me along to her studio instead of bringing me an object, since she herself collects broken objects for her own art making, and thus had a wide range of possibilities to choose from.

This also, and many more interesting things.

It was a bit of a cheat maybe for me to go and pick some objects out myself, but since she works in a similar way to me it also gave us a good excuse to swap opinions, and for me to have a look at Flax studios which I had wanted to see anyway. These two pieces suggested themselves both in shape and in function, the cage being bottomless which meant the divers eye might come in handy.

The combination gave itself really.

The impression of the cage with the Cyclops’ eye was one of depression, but it lacked personality. I felt again that a protagonist was called for, to pull the suggested story along, and to further focus the attention of the viewer. The scruffy old bird is hanging on for what he is worth, fearing the fall to such an extent that he is missing the obvious opportunity of escape.

Clay and feathers, and a conscious lack of too much detail.

Object no. 20 & 21

This small vanity figure had been bought on a trip to Paris, but since then lost its head after falling off the mantle piece.

Always staring in the mirror does you no good.

Peter had bought it for his wife, but as it turned out, luckily for me, she actually likes skulls much better, so why he hadn’t bought something with the grim reaper instead I don’t know. At that point, however, I didn’t know of her preference for caputs, but a vanity loosing her head anyway suggested itself into a vanitas with a dead head. I added a small, real mirror so that she could continue looking at herself looking at herself. Whoever said Death is a man anyway, and old to boot? What proof do we have for that?

Who is looking at who?

Object no. 31

Bike seat for doll.

Celia handed in two toys, that were incidentally both intended to help transport dolls around. Funny that neither of them had stood up to the pressures of the average 6 year old girl playing. Which suggested that maybe girls don’t always play so calmly, and that they might therefore prefer something a bit tougher.

Bent and broken doll pram.

The solution was hidden in the shape of the bike seat. The pram with its wheels was so versatile it could have pulled me in any of a number of directions, but the bike seat was very limited. A limitation, however, can also mean that when you do find the correct answer, it fits so much better.

The shape of the bike seat couldn't really be converted to anything else.

I added a lot of parts to turn the bike seat and the pram into an arc weld for girls, but the shape of the welding mask was the crucial part. The weld itself is a LED torch, slightly re-jigged to push the LED out to the very front, and the blue plastic screen of course shields the very colour emitted by the LED. Celia very quickly got a grip on how to use it and off she went soldering imaginary pipes together.

Didn't need much explaining really.

Object no. 6 & 7

I know where he got it... in the Pound Store.

This redundant cheap Tv aerial was handed in by someone who himself works in TV, which made the object very suitable. It was a bit of a struggle turning it into something beautiful, so I focused instead on what possible functions one could imagine for a piece that didn’t any more serve its purpose as a communicator. I tied it in with what I imagine of the harsh, competitive world of media, and with the self assertiveness and make it or disappear kind of attitudes necessary to survive there. The device is meant to be used as a kind of self help gadget, you set the first antenna when you get up in the morning, aiming hopefully, for an ambitious target, and the second when you come home after work, maybe not always reaching up to the heights you had wanted. Compare the distance as a way of preparing for the next working day. To be used by freelancers instead of a boss.

Set it down on your nightside table, as a reminder that you can always be made redundant.

Object no. 35