THE BIRTH OF EQUILIQUE

I have been lucky enough to have spent the past 35 years doing what I love to do, sculpting animals, and, gratifyingly, found people liked them enough to buy them. If you wish, you can see more of this on my web-site johnperry.com.

In 2005, while tinkering with some of the newly available, very powerful rare earth magnets, it dawned on me that these could probably be very interestingly applied to figures of people.

So I sculpted a series of figures of acrobats that confirmed this intuition, discovering that they would not only stand up, but that they could be stood one upon another in an amazing way.

From this came the realization that if the figures themselves were balanced, even more dramatic constructions could be made. So I re-sculpted all the figures so that they each balanced not on one, but several points.

Experimenting with these figures brought about the third realization that if the dimensions of the figures (heights and horizontal distance between the magnets) were standardized, the construction possibilities would be greatly magnified. So (deep breath) I re-sculpted all the figures once again, making them all multiples in height of the balls that I had added to the mix.

I guess if I were smarter I would have figured the whole thing out at the beginning. Anyway, I ended up with a completely new toy for young folk / interactive art piece for adults, for which I have applied for a patent.