Serendipity Strikes Again

Yesterday, I was moving a couple mobiles around the house. One is from last year (see here), and the other is one of the first mobiles I ever made (from November 2004):

I have always been bothered by the sparseness of both mobiles and was actually thinking of dismantling them (for lack of hanging space). But then, I happened to suspend them both from the same hook, and, to my surprise, a whole new mobile emerged (44" H x 36" W):

The unfinished quality from before is now gone, replaced by an interesting tangle of wires. The verticality of the earlier mobile complements the horizontal lines of the later one. And the flat pieces, tightly geometric in one case and textured and organic in the other, somehow speak to each other, despite being made over four years apart. There is a layered complexity in this juxtaposition which, perhaps because it wasn't carefully planned, seems curious and alive, even if it's not altogether "whole".

To solidify the whole composition, I connected the two mobiles by a short piece of wire at the top and interlaced one wire from the bird mobile through a loop in the vertical mobile. This way, the different pieces generally avoid banging into each other, although it still does happen sometimes, and that's okay -- I think the collisions are actually part of the piece.

In fact, I originally intended my last mobile here to have collisions as well -- the mini bird pieces were to be overlapping both visually and in physical space -- but I strayed from that concept as I went along. I now see how such a radical (to me, at least) idea can work in practice.