Mobiles

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All mobiles are handmade by me, ship fully assembled within three business days (unless it’s a custom order), and come with a ceiling hook. They’re available through my shop on Etsy, or contact me for a custom mobile or kinetic art installation. Please also see the feedback from previous customers and my policies.

Wondering what these things are you’re looking at? They are mobiles, as in art, type of sculpture based on balance and characterized by the ability to move when propelled by air currents, by touch, or by a small motor at any one time. The most striking feature of the mobile is that, unlike traditional sculpture, it achieves its artistic effect through movement; it is the most familiar form of kinetic art, which requires movement of some kind.

A typical mobile consists of a group of shapes, frequently abstract, that are connected by wires, string (often nylon thread), metal rods, hollow aluminum tubes, swivels, or the like. The shapes are usually made of sheet metal, wood, plastic, glass, acrylic glass (plexi glass), foam, paper, or aluminum honeycomb panels. Although mobiles are usually suspended (often hanging from a ceiling), some are designed to stand on a platform or floor, and are then usually called “stabiles” (a term coined by Jean Arp), or just “kinetic sculptures”, the term “kinetic” meaning “moving” or “in motion”.

I’ve come across a mobile made in 1751, however the Russian artist Aleksandr Rodchenko and the French artist Marcel Duchamp (who gave it the name “mobile”) are credited with experimenting with the form first in the 1920s, which was then mostly developed by the American sculptor Alexander Calder (influenced by the abstract work of Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró and Sophie Taeuber-Arp) beginning in the 1930s.

Other notable mobile makers and kinetic sculptors include Bruno Munari, Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Martin, Jean Tinguely, Julio Le Parc, Yvaral (Jean-Pierre Vasarely), Joël Stein, Man Ray, George Rickey, Stephen H. Kawai, Ebon Heath, Christian Flensted, Matt Richards (Ekko Mobiles), Julie Frith, Maurizio Cattelan, and Miranda Watkins.