This immersionheater coil unfortunately never made it to the finish.

Kim McIntosh came in with a lovely old immersionheatercoil that her plumber had salvaged from her old boiler. We were all quite enthusiastic about it since it was all rusty and broken and corroded, covered with beautiful shades of brown and bronze, and I had just started planning its new form when we were warned that the strange white powder leaking out of it might just be asbestos, not so fun anymore. The coil quickly ended up in the skip, and Kim was now without an artwork. When the council workers at the recycling centre later told us that the old coil had most likely been entirely harmless, I felt even worse, and decided to try to make Kim something else. I got my chance when someone else’s digital camera yielded plenty of interesting parts to work with, allowing me to create something small for Kim, even if it didn’t have anything to do with her immersion heater.

A small device that offers an alternative view of the world.

Extracting the viewfinder from the camera, and mounting it inside a hollowed out decorative wooden curtain-pole end-stopper, I fashioned what is much more a viewing device than a sculpture, since it’s for looking through rather than at. Because of the optics involved, the view one would get holding the Big Picture in front of one’s eye, is an extremely small and focused image of what’s really there. To get any kind of overview one would have to endlessly turn and twist to slowly bit by bit scan off the surroundings, and add the many impressions together in one’s mind, a bit like when managing and planning one’s life.

Object no. 5