My good friend Scott spends his days working as a machinist in a large shop (I just recently forced him to watch the Christian Bale flick, too.) - which means that he often has a great deal of idle thinking time and occasionally time to turn those ideas into reality.

This week, he emerged from his day job with a fully completed, loosely Steampunk-styled flower to give to his girlfriend.

Made entirely from industrial refuse that he collected from around the shop - machine inserts, wire bundles and ball bearing doodads - it’s a great little piece of industrial art that measures about a foot in height. Though extremely heavy, due to so many dense metals being used, it’s surprisingly delicate in appearance. I love the added touch of the single thorn, and the portion of the stem from thorn up to flower is designed to sway a bit with vibration or movement, completing the contrast between industrial harshness and organic fragility.

The pictures are my doing and are unfortunately not the best. I take full responsibility. Nevertheless, they give you a decent idea of how this piece turned out.

Here’s the full Flickr set…

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Want more info on Steampunk? The Steampunk Workshop has some brilliant examples of the style (I am in love with the LCD monitor!), Boing Boing is always covering Steampunk design (you should read them everyday anyway!) and the Wiki entry for Steampunk will tell you a bit about the literary genre for those not in the know.

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tags: art, flowers, industrial art, machinist, sculpture, steampunk

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at Jul 08, 07 | 3:13 pm and is filed under Art, Just Noumenon Posts, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.