Featured Artist Amy Flynn

Combining two of her favorite things – art and shopping – artist Amy Flynn scours flea markets and antique stores to find parts for her whimsical sculptures. View her website to see more.

 

 

Since I started making my Fobots® (Found Object Robots) in 2008, I consider myself the luckiest person ever. I get to make a living doing my two favorite things—creating art and hunting for treasure at flea markets. How cool is that?

 

 

I started out as an illustrator, and worked for twenty-seven years designing greeting cards, children’s books and giftware. But in 2008, the economy tanked, and most of my freelance work evaporated. Faced with a lot of free time on my hands, some decent tool skills, a lifelong fascination with robots, and a basement full of junk, I started tinkering, and the first Fobot was born. It was embarrassingly crude, but I had an absolute blast making it.

 

 

More bots followed, and I was encouraged to sell them at a wholesale market. Many of the other artists at the market tried to convince me that big outdoor art festivals were a better fit for my work. One basically dared me to apply to the St. Louis Art Festival, and I did. I got in.

 

 

This is kind of the craft world equivalent of saying “Gee, I think I’d like to be in a play!” and getting cast in a Broadway show on your first audition.

 

 

My husband Phil and I now travel all over the country to top arts festivals from Miami to Seattle. Thank goodness he likes to drive. The travel also helps us find parts for the bots; we stop at every flea market and antique mall we see on the road. We also go to big antique festivals, and I find cool stuff on eBay and at auctions as well.

 

 

Here’s how I work. I take my finds and lay them out on a big table in my workshop. I usually start with a body, then mix and match pieces around it to get an idea of design and proportion. This part can go quickly, or it can take months waiting for the right parts to get just the right look.

 

 

Once I’m satisfied, I solder and bolt my finds together. When I’m done, they get a copper tag on the back with their number, and a metal heart inside.

 

 

They get a name, too—and I love bad puns. Every week on the Fobot Facebook page, I have “Monday Punday,” where I post some of the worst offenders. Some recent favorites: “Thelonius Junk,” “The Wizard of Odds and Ends,” “The HindenBorg” and “Alien Nate.”

 

 

I love finding discarded things that you just know were once someone’s treasure—a toy, a piece of jewelry, a camera—and making them “special” again. And there’s something fun about taking vintage objects and creating something as futuristic as robots out of them.

 

 

I also like to make them asymmetrical, with mismatched legs, or one eye bigger than the other. There’s a saying, “We like our friends for their virtues, but we love them for their flaws.” That’s why I make them flawed. It makes them more “human.”

 

Artist Amy Flynn invites you to follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

 

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