Linn Meyers is herself a great visual artist. She makes amazingly intricate drawings and paintings with weirdly 3-dimensional, swirling patterns of lines, often centring around circles or holes.
The object she brought in was a holder for files or letters that used to stand on her father’s office desk. It had lost one of its little rubber feet (on the image above, I have already removed the other three), which was Linn’s stated reason for handing it in. I suspect that it was much more a question of her not really needing it, since she probably got all of her office work done in the virtual realm of her laptop. Still she obviously wanted to hang on to it. It doesn’t surprise me at all. Not just because of its origin and sentimental value. For anyone who has seen her paintings the association to swirling lines and holes and circles is just too obvious to miss. I guess that was maybe an unconscious choice on her behalf.
A lot of the repairs I do end up being funny somehow. I think this is because association and poetry work very similarly to humour. I am very glad though, when I manage to make something suitable that is not funny at all. So, in this case, my task was to give Linn a reason to keep her fathers old desk filing tool. Preferably in a way that made her live with it and use it, instead of just displaying it on a book shelf. And wouldn’t it be great if she could use it for her work just as her father had used it for his? Playing around a bit with the physical properties of the thing, the solution seemed obvious to me. What the viewer of these images can’t see, is that the entire spring is just fixed in the very ends. That means that if something thick was squeezed in between two of the loops, they would simply spring aside a bit and push the tension to the side. This means, that the thickness of the objects to be held was not limited, and also that several objects pushed into the loops would make it possible to also hold thinner things firmly in the spiral.
The spiral itself works as an excellent holder for brushes and pens. Especially for brushes perhaps, since the benefit over just sticking them in a tall glass or mug is that they don’t risk touching bouncing around and brushes with each other, so that one could quite easily use the spiral to hold a number of wet brushes without risk of mixing and messing up the paints on them. At least great for an oil painter. The only addition I had to make was to add a way of clamping the spiral to a stand, or chair, or easel. The metal clamp that I attached can be turned so that the baseplate can be equally mounted horizontally and vertically. I hope Linn will find it useful, and that her father’s old office spiral will find its new home in her studio.