Machine

In the summer of 2011, I visited a decommissioned mill in Millbury, Massachusetts to collect the remnants of a massive textile factory. The building contained piles of rusted machine parts for the taking. I took what I could lift for a new machine made from the ghosts of old ones.

These parts had performed their duties for decades—cutting, pressing, spinning—until the systems they served moved on.

There’s something human in the way machines break down. They push themselves beyond capacity. This piece was made to honor the quiet collapse. To give form to the idea that even in dysfunction, there is grace. The sculpture stands not as a replica of utility, but as a portrait of wear, fatigue, and the possibility of reinvention. It eventually destroys itself.