Time for Tea

("Time For Tea", 2013-2014 multimedia sculpture)

What time is it? It's time for tea!

As you might have guessed this is not one of the pieces that I built from scratch. I bought the tea set, and the white gloves, and the clock was salvaged form an abandoned building. My dad works in construction/demolition, and every now and again he'll bring me something random and awesome from an abandoned house, in this case it was the head of a grandfather clock!

Interesting side note, some of the gears on this piece are bent slightly. This is because I opened the clockwork mechanism without bothering to learn about how they're put together. Apparently clocks have these crazy things called main springs which wind up tighter and tighter inside the clock as the gears turn. They are made of strong, thin metal coils with rather sharp edges... you can probably guess where this is going. I opened the clock work mechanism and the springs SHOT out, slicing many my fingers open. I'm all better now, but I still have some serious trust issues with clocks.... Despite my fears, I sallied forth to finish this piece, fingers trembling only slightly as I worked. 

The arms are made of mattress foam wrapped around a skeleton of thin steal rods which are welded to the inside of the clock. They're sturdy but still posable if I ever want to change the position.

The most common question I get with this piece is "How did you make the black gunk poring out of the teapot?" It's actually just hot glue form a glue gun, I painted black after it dried.

I do plan to take more pictures of this piece now that it's completed and mounted on my wall. My bedroom has horribly tacky striped wallpaper that makes an excellent background for it.

The sad thing is I keep looking up at it when I need to know the time, and then I remember that it's not a real clock anymore. I'm considering cutting out the picture of the globe on the clock face and putting a small working clock in there, but that's a job for Future Nick.