Lifting People’s Spirits
I make uplifting spiral sculptures that are powered by the sun. They are designed to last forever and to lift people's spirits. It gives me enormous satisfaction to build each piece, which I do by hand. I then send them out around the world where they sit on people's window sills. The whole process is enjoyable, especially the feedback I get. People seem to love them. I have made around 1,700 of them now in my workshop in rural Wiltshire. They also do some good because they are produced from waste fishing nets, which would otherwise go to landfill. So they help to solve a real problem in an elegant and engaging way.
I have always made things. It's been my way, ever since I was a child. At age five I was given a tool set for Christmas and complained that it was a child's set, so my Gran bought me a real one. It's how I express myself. Not always in the making, sometimes in the imagining and the drawing and dreaming. My Dad was an aerospace engineer. My Grandpa managed production lines in the West Midlands. There's a creative and inventive spirit in England that I have in my blood. But I have no legacy to follow other than to do my best and I am in pursuit of excellence, always. I think there's something magic in taking an idea from your imagination, through drawings and into reality as an object, which becomes part of someone's life.
I am a dreamer and a doer. I don't read books. If I go on holiday it's with a blank sketchbook. I don't watch TV and I don't listen to podcasts. I don't drink coffee and I don't worry about things out of my control. I find inspiration through experience and observation and I talk to a lot of people, all the time, about lots of things. That's how I stay aware. Things just come to me from out the ether and I don't really try to explain that. I have a lovely relationship with my imagination and I find the more relaxed I am the more clearly I can see. Mainly, I am looking at the world with a big heart and wondering how I can make it a more beautiful place. I have to be really careful about how much time I let myself look at my smartphone and social media. I find these highly addictive and can easily get over-stimulated, and that tends to kill clarity of thought making my ideas become more disjointed. When I avoid my phone I have better ideas.
Some ideas might sit in my imagination for years. I often make something playful to start with - like a prop - a pretend version of what I want to create. It's a very childish process but is the best place to start. My latest piece Wonder, for example, took around two years of philosophical contemplation before I could come close to articulating it physically and even then I couldn't draw it, I just wasn't skilled enough. So I crudely bent some wire to try and shape it. I was just playing. Then I scribbled it. Then drew it more carefully. Then I used meditation to visualise it very clearly and then set about modelling it parametrically in CAD - but even that process took me around six months and I had to be taught how to make the geometry work as I wanted it to. Now a year later and I am finally fabricating them out of metal using advanced manufacturing. Take a look, the shape is special.
Every project is different so every process is different. I recently made an enclosure to hide an electricity mains box in our courtyard at home. I made it from an old bench and it looks really sweet. No drawings or plans, just needing a solution and building it there and then with a saw, hammer and nails. Sometimes it's nice to do that. Other times you have to be really precise and well planned.
I feel the process deeply, within me. I know this is what I am supposed to be doing. I trust myself implicitly even though I guff things up all the time. I also tend to face my convictions and see things through to the end. So I can be tough on myself sometimes, but that's mainly because it's hard work and it doesn't come easy. I have overcome many obstacles. In fact, I often deliberately take the hardest path and I have done that since I was a child, I think because there is most to learn that way. But wisdom tells me to go easier on myself now and manage my energy more gracefully.
Sometimes you just have to know when to let things go, perhaps at the point where they no longer serve you or give you energy. I pioneered mobile 360 degree video in 2001-2011 and had two start ups. I was making omni-directional optical systems for immersive imaging. I was ahead of the world and ended up having my blueprints copied by a billion dollar Korean corporation most of us know. I put a decade into that space without it buying me dinner. But the smart thing was to eventually let it go and build something new.
I am a harder judge on myself than others can ever be so at the point I am ready to make something public I am not concerned about either winning praise or receiving judgement. I normally just want to inspire people with what I've been up to. Usually I am proud to show something, to share my work, especially if the 'thing' is helpful to people - then I can't wait to get it out there. It's very exciting and feedback is the currency that keeps you going. But all projects are different. I have an invention I am working on that sits in tandem with Wonder. It's a concept I call the SlowWorm Soil Regenerator and is a mechanical means of improving soil structure and bioturbation - it's suited to improving the health of very poor soils and weaves organic matter into topsoil. Outside of a small number of specialist experts I haven't shown anyone, as it's a visionary body of work and I had to find the right audience for it in order to qualify that my thinking was sound - I'm not interested in sharing it with my social media followers for example - but I was made a finalist for a big soil innovation competition and now I am advancing it. So it's important to find the right audience. Not everyone will get what you are doing.
Wonder is currently my favourite piece of work, because it's my latest piece and it hasn't annoyed me yet. The first one I made will go to live in one of the most sacred spaces in England this summer. It will be installed in St Aldhelm's Chapel inside Malmesbury's medieval Abbey, across the hall from the resting place of Athelstan, the first King of England. The Church sees infinity, eternity and the essence of DNA in it, while others see the very genesis of consciousness. I have seen people brought to tears watching it. Some people, admittedly only a few, simply aren't bothered by it and that's great also. That's life and all feedback reveals something different. I am happy with it. I wanted to bare my soul and to show the dynamic energy pathways central to our life force and I seem to have achieved that elegantly and originally in this piece and it took all of my creative powers to do so. There's now talk of it going on a world tour and reaching a vast scale with a huge public installation. That would please me enormously as I see this place as the isles of wonder - there is magic in making and I don't recognise that in much of what I have seen since the referendum - I want that creative spirit to rise. My intention is to create a space where we can breath together, in unity to imagine peace. Wonder does that.
Tom Lawton