Piece based on creeping baby doll patent model by Robin Bale. "This piece was a response to the “Creeping Baby”, a prototype crawling baby doll in the Smithsonian collection. This was an obviously creepy object; the juxtaposition of naturalistic face and hands with a (very beautiful) clockwork interior placed it somewhere around the uncanny valley as well as squarely in the territory of hybrid monstrosities created by the mean kid in the first Toy Story film. I first wanted to work with that uncanniness, but then came to think about how the object would sound when working. "The clockwork mechanism led me to think about the temporalities that we live in (or under) and an economic system that, whilst promising transcendence of whatever “now” we happen to be trapped in if enough hard work and aspiration is applied, just seems to personalise failure to escape systemic problems that no individual can escape through their own efforts. Hence, the lyrical content and the recurring clockwork n
