Wire is flat out fun to work with. I’ve been playing with it as an art/craft medium for many years and find the process very addictive. Wire is cheap, readily available in many gauges, metals and colors, and working with wire requires only a few simple tools.

I’ve admired Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) ever since I discovered his art at age seventeen, when his outdoor sculpture, Hello Girls, commissioned in 1964, was installed at the Los Angeles County Art Museum one year later. This water-powered sculpture totally blew me away. Calder worked extensively in wire throughout his 50-year career and is most widely known as the inventor of the art form we call the mobile.

Calder’s ‘Goldfish Bowl’, a charming, interactive wire sculpture made in 1929 as a last-minute addition to a gallery exhibit, is funky and playful, and turned out to be a big hit! He had used cranks earlier to make his circus figures move, but his Fishbowl was his first sculpture to incorporate a cranking mechanism. I’ve also seen this same sculpture titled ‘Fishbowl with Crank’. I smile every time I see a picture of Calder’s Goldfish Bowl, and would love to see it in person and operate the crank.

I decided to make a Fishbowl with Crank, and the result is shown above and below. I experimented with several different cranking mechanisms. The crank on my fishbowl differs from Calder’s, but it works nicely. I will make several more fishbowls and try different mechanisms. In the meantime, I am quite pleased with this one. It makes me smile, too!

My fishbowl project was fun and quite challenging at the same time. Here’s my challenge to all you wire artists out there – Check out the photo of Calder’s Goldfish Bowl, then construct one of your own! The only requirement is that one (or more) fish ’swim’ when the crank is turned. Then send me digital images of the result.