Futuristic fabrications
An Otago sheddie turns unwanted items into incredible art
Asci-fi artist working from a backyard shed in Central Otago is turning stuff no one wants into things that are sought after across the globe.
Sean Boyd uses anything that takes his fancy, from light fittings and plumbing parts to typewriters and old vacuum cleaners, to make futuristic fabrications which include ray guns, life-sized robots, jetpacks, and other cosmic curiosities.
“The satisfaction is in finding parts, imagining outcomes and working out how they can fit together,” says Sean, who gets most of his raw materials from the local recycling centre, Central Otago WasteBusters. “I fill the back of car for about $35. I think I’ve got more waste here than the waste station,” he says, looking round at the piles of paraphernalia in his humble garage in Clyde.
Are these real?
Sean’s creations, many of which look as if they’ve been unearthed in a Raiders of the Lost Ark archaeological dig, are designed to look and feel real, from his ray guns to an apparently steam-powered walking stick complete with moving pistons. “I like to create pieces that make the onlooker question if they’re real, before investigating further to discover they are created from everyday items,” he says. “I know I’ve done my job when I see people looking from 30 metres away thinking ‘What the hell is that?!’”
While no junk is without possibilities, Sean has favourite materials for his sci-fi sculptures. He loves the shape of the classic Tellus vacuum cleaner and says the plain casings of defunct Zip and Rinnai water heaters often cover quirky internal workings and sought-after raw materials like copper tubing. Cogs and gauges are hard to come by since the steampunk movement gained popularity, but Sean recently scored a windfall of nine
brass gauges from a Roxburgh hydroelectric dam refit. “They were going to throw them out but the electrician said ‘I know someone who’ll want them’.”
Parts harmony
He likes to keep the integrity of the original components while camouflaging them by their placement. “It sometimes feels like cheating because someone has already done the design work, but the art is in getting bits that look right with each other,” says Sean, whose eyesight is live-wired to his imagination. A double-headed ceramic insulator is an owl’s head; a box of cupboard hinges a scorpion; a set of light fittings that were “smirking at me” became a family of happy aliens; an old diesel burner’s fate was sealed because of its uncanny resemblance to Kenny on the South Park TV series.
He holds up the expansion chamber from a two-stroke motorcycle. “Isn’t that beautiful? I’m going to make it into a hummingbird,” he says. It won’t be an ordinary bird, but some whimsical galactic creature that likely lights up.
Lamps are among his best sellers. “Some people are happy with things they can just look at while others want things that do something,” says Sean, who does the wiring himself, then gets it checked and ticketed by an electrician.
Useless inventions
Others seek the spectacularly impractical. Sean, who has exhibited at the World Of Wearable Art (WOW) in Wellington, is currently devising a series of patently pointless pieces for an exhibition of Useless Inventions at Wanaka Puzzling World. So far, he has hatched up a hamster-driven Singer sewing machine, cooking pot with
“I think I’ve got more waste here than the waste station”
internal handle, and an utterly useless cutlery set with rope handles. Apart from a bit of showmanship for the photo shoot, Sean says he does very little welding. “I lay all the pieces out like a big jigsaw then usually bolt or screw them together.” Aside from spanners and screwdrivers, his mostused tools are a second-hand drill press salvaged from a deceased estate, a Ryobi bench grinder, and a hacksaw.
Dremel tools also come in handy for inscribing alien hieroglyphics on metal surfaces. His shed is packed with potential-laden junk sorted into such categories as brass and copper, stainless steel and aluminium, plumbing parts, and light fittings. He tries to keep it tidy but not overly organized as he figures fossicking keeps his mental inventory up to date.
Going with the flow
As far as construction goes, Sean doesn’t follow plans and has neither rules nor boundaries. “I don’t sketch anything. I pick things up and look at them and think ‘That’s how you normally look at it, so what is it like that?’ Then I start grabbing other things that fit with it and start assembling. I tend to be quite manic when I’m in the mood,” he says. “As long as I’m having fun it will be a good result.”
Sean sells his works through an online mailing list, with most pieces selling within an hour or two of being offered. His international market has grown as steadily as the stream of
“As long as I’m having fun it will be a good result”
tourists pedalling through town on the Otago Central Rail Trail, and business rocketed when he took his wares to the Queenstown market. His biggest market is Europe, but he also has a solid fan-base in America. Of the 125 major pieces he has made in the past five years, each worth $1000–$2000, only 10 have remained in New Zealand.
Recycled Roger
One is ROGER (Recycled Object Gathering Electronic Robot), a 1.5m-high, classic 1980s Japanese automaton who stands in reception at The Mind Lab science discovery centre in Auckland. A German visitor was so impressed that he ordered one for himself, but requested a “menacing earth invader not a comical butler”. And so JET was born (pictured below).
Sean fitted arched taps to form malevolent eyebrows on its water pump head and incorporated various vacuum cleaner parts into the rest of the body. That client has bought 32 pieces and flown Sean over to Germany to help set them up in his mansion where he has a collection of more than 200 motorcycles and a Swiss military helicopter suspended from the ceiling. While over there, he lent Sean a motorbike and went touring with him for a couple of weeks. “All from making stuff out of junk,” Sean muses.
He takes on a few commissions, but insists there is no obligation to buy as they will be the products of his own imagination and interpretation. When the owner of a tattoo studio in Germany with a warped sense of humour wanted a device to scare nervous customers, Sean obliged with a jackhammer-sized contraption complete with syringes full of coloured dyes leading to a drill tip.
No two creations are the same. “You can have all the money in the world but the only difference between your Lamborghini and your neighbour’s is the colour of the trim,” he says. “With these, you’ve got the only one in the entire galaxy.”
To view more of Sean’s creations, check out www.spaceboyd.com.