Nick Smyth - Iron Sculptures

Ferric Fantasia : System Y

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Price: £195

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About this piece

Several pieces of a child's swing framework, plus bits of an old stock fence, two horseshoes and a broken hinge form the base for a series of 19th Century communication wire connecting devices.

The lady of the house would summon a servant by pulling a sash, typically beside the drawing room fireplace.

A copper wire would connect the sash to the roof space above where these quadrants would turn the direction of the "pull" across the loft and back down into the kitchen to ring the appropriate bell.

Here these quadrants are all carefully joined up to go absolutely nowhere and the system is equipped with the "telephone earth" required in a bygone age.

So is this a communication device?

Well! It was common knowledge at the time that British Telecom had nearly finished equipping the whole country with state-of-the-art digital telephone exchanges.

Lacking any vestige of artistic imagination, they called their new equipment "SYSTEM 'X'".

The next generation of this should therefore be "SYSTEM 'Y'"!

Here is one version of what it may look like.