NOT NORMALISTS: Jeremy Mayer's Incredible Typewriter Sculptures
This article is part of our NOT NORMALISTS series. As part of the MINI celebration of everything NOT NORMAL, we salute those who defy expectation, chart their own path and lead by example as inspiring pioneers.
"I always looked at the typewriter as something that looked alive, or as if it had been born in a mad scientist laboratory." - Jeremy Mayer
Rows upon rows of typewriters fill Jeremy Mayer's studio in Oakland, California. He's not setting up shop for a vintage secretary office - he's a sculptor and a colourful personality. Jokingly, he refers to this panorama of defunct clerical machinery as "death-row". On the floor one sees the guts and bones of typewriters of all kinds. His shelves are littered with hundreds, if not thousands of tiny parts.
So what do you do with a seemingly endless supply of obsolete office equipment? Start building. The eccentric sculptor carefully deconstructs the technological dinosaurs, then re-assembles them into life-sized, anatomically correct figures with lanky limbs and electrified eyes. The sculptures come together without any help from soldering, welding, gluing, or any other traditional sculpting gear - everything the artist needs can be found in this one antiquated, mechanical instrument.
Scroll down to see more of the busts, wildlife, and full-scaled figures Jeremy has crafted, and hear what he has to say about breathing life into the cold steel of these old school click-and-clackers.
Jammed type bars, missing keys, smudging ink. Typewriters can have you pulling your hair out before producing anything creative, but not for Jeremy Mayer. These mechanisms fascinate him endlessly, as he can spend day after day cross-legged on the floor with screwdrivers, pliers and other tools, unfastening springs, pulling out pins, and deconstructing it entirely, bit by tiny bit. "This idea that we're taking apart what we know, and what we already built, and reworking it and moving forward - it's timeless," Jeremy explains of his process.
The industrious artist has been building futuristic typewriter sculptures for almost 20 years. As a little boy he spent long nights dreaming of a look into the ever-present clicking instrument in his home. When he finally took one apart in his student days, he was irreversibly hooked.
One of his most ambitious projects was Nude IV, or Delilah. Quite the high-maintenance gal, she took about 1,400 hours to assemble. Not surprisingly, patience is key for Jeremy's practices. The figure stands an impressive 6 foot and 4 inches tall and is composed of parts from 40 different typewriters. Together they add up to a laborious - but precious piece of artwork.
Though fascinated by its mechanics, Jeremy loves his typewriters "inside out" - he adores the machines just as much as he wants to destroy them. But he has an interesting relationship with his unusual medium. "I'm not really much of a nostalgic person, I wouldn't think of these as the good old days, so there is a part of me that wants to wreck these, as much I love them," he says.
Jeremy moulded his captivation with the typewriter into this noteworthy TEDx talk at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco:
For a little more wonder, this awe-inspiring time-lapse video created by Golden Gate 3D shows scenes from Jeremy's studio and the San Francisco Bay Area.
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