Rick Hale

Rick Hale is an autodidact clockmaker based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His work attempts to explore & challenge the way people feel the passage of time in the post-industrial era.

 Artist's Statement

I've learned most of what I know from old books on mechanical engineering, clockmaking, physics, & horological theory. An avid interest in reading has been a common thread in my life since I was a boy. The profusion of knowledge that is out there in written form, waiting to be unearthed, is an eternal source of inspiration for me.

In combining these ancient traditions—clockmaking & woodwrighting—I have two aims.

First, I seek to change the way we feel & process the flow of time. Time is hard on living things as it passes, surging endlessly out of the future & into the past. We've all felt it. Gentle, silent, ceaseless destruction. The slow, entropic loss of information & physical form. It's why many of us create. It's why we push ourselves to learn, to teach, to grow. It's why we work through the night, sometimes, laboring toward dawn, our efforts a quiet rage against oblivion.

I also wish to revitalize & showcase the ancient brilliance hidden in the mechanisms of my favorite clockmakers—Harrison, Breguet, Burgess, Arnfield, Tompion, & all the rest. I am honored to learn from the work of such masters, & in the coming decades I hope to build on what they’ve done.