Tom Haney

I began carving through the encouragement of Georgia folk-artist Leroy Almon Sr. Later, Kentucky carvers Minnie and Garland Adkins and Jim Lewis provided invaluable insight, as well as the more mundane, but necessary, boost of allowing me to steal chunks of wood from their scrap piles. My first attempt seemed too static and not very exciting. Having made numerous whirligigs in the past I decided to carve an articulated figure to hang from the back of one. Once finished, the figure didn’t have quite the motion that I was looking for, so I had the idea to make him a marionette. Almost instantly I thought of putting him into a sort of stage-like box with keys out front to operate the arms and legs. What resulted was the first incarnation of “Mr. Oddball.”

What I try to create with my pieces is a sense of excitement and fun; a piece of art that you can interact with. I like them to have the feeling of a kind of special object that someone made to entertain their family with long before television or video games; something that was later stashed in the attic and just recently rediscovered. I enjoy making these pieces because they involve many processes including carving, mechanical design, assembling, painting and aging. Invariably, working with mechanisms presents a whole set of problems most artists don’t have to deal with. With every piece, I become more of an inventor, which involves a lot of trial and error experimentation. But with every error, I learn something, and that’s what I like most.