Fine artist and self-described master hoarder Nemo Gould conjures up fantastic sculptures made entirely of found objects. Rich wood and gleaming chrome catch the eye as they cycle through their kinetic loops, while tentacles and antennae extend in a playful fashion like a sci-fi comic book come to life.
The Megalodon is Gould’s latest work, a 16-foot-long salvaged fuel tank from an F-94 bomber plane’s wing. The shark has working propellors for fins, and a tail that glides back and forth ominously. A cutaway on the side reveals various boiler and control rooms, each with their own delicately installed moving parts. It’s packed full of tiny human figures and whimsical creatures alike, all in mid-task as they operate their predatory underwater vessel.
The project took Gould a little over two years to finish. “I’d wanted to make a cutaway vessel for years, and had been putting objects aside for that purpose,” he explains. “I know it sounds backwards, but the tank was the last missing piece.” He found it at an aircraft salvage business, and from there he was able to assemble the final sculpture.
Photos by Christopher Potter
Gould says his process is a lot like solving a puzzle. “I maintain an extensive collection of things that I feel strongly about one way or another,” he says. “The challenge is to find which of the million potential relationships between these things could lead to the best art.” More so than his skills as an artist, machinist, fabricator, woodworker, et al., Gould says that “maintaining a vast, organized library of seemingly random objects is the real trick.”
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