Jeremy Mayer is an artist who makes amazing sculptures out of old typewriters — "the more broken the better", as he notes. He's appeared in Boing Boing many many times before, with posts about his sculptures of a chihuahua skeleton, a life-sized nude, a deer and a human head, among others.
Now he's working on a new series of wall-mounted symmetrical pieces, which have a gorgeously cthulhuian quality to them — they look like something from space, or the briny deep, or (why choose?) both. They include chunks of typewriters donated by the Hollywood emperor of these noble machines, Tom Hanks. Colossal has a good write-up of them, with some comments by Mayer.
Size-wise, they're quite imposing, as Mayer notes on an Instagram post:
It's really hard to convey how big, how complex these wall pieces are.
I'd like to explain a bit how I came to make these.
You've all seen here the work I do based on living things: birds, other critters, people, and anatomy. I use fairly small typewriter components for that work because it tends to better represent the kinds of anatomical features in people and animals.
Over the years I've had to jettison some of my typewriters and components because I had to move or in lean times when I couldn't afford a studio, but I've had my current palette of parts and machines for about 15 years.
I've been carrying around in that time almost literally a ton of parts that are big and bulky and for which I haven't found an application in my sculpture. So I find that I have, for example, scores of chassis from IBM Selectrics, five or six Olympia frames, or 15 Remington platens.
After my residency in Mumbai, India at Godrej, at which I made, with a lot of help, wall-hanging "mandalas" and a 13-foot tall lotus, I realized that I could take all of these matching components that I've been carrying around from studio to studio to make more mandala-like reliefs using the same methods learned..
This one here is made from 3 Olympia desktops (one of which you'll notice was an Arabic machine, which was given to me by Tom Hanks, broken badly), keyboard parts from a few Smith Coronas, some mustard yellow Royal parts, some big gold anodized parts from Selectrics, Selectric frames and keys, and thousands of other connective springs, screws, nuts, pins, bits, and bobs. There are about 3,000 parts. I lost count of the hours I worked on it, but you might be able to imagine this taking a few months of full-time work.
The sculpture is 5 feet in diameter and weighs about 80 lbs.
Some more pix below, reprinted here with Mayer's permission! You can see more of his stuff via his Instagram, his web site, or his Twitter account.
