About me

Hi and welcome to my website.

I am really pleased you are taking the time to have a look at my kinetic art work and sculptures.

My name is Martin Jarvis and for as long as I can remember I have had this passion for all things metal and an innate curiosity for seeing how things work. Needless to say that from a very young age anything that caught my interest, and could be dismantled, feared me and my trusty friend the screwdriver….

Growing up, I fell in love with motorcycles; riding, racing, repairing them, falling off a few, customising them with hand-made parts, and eventually designing and building some. Hence developing my skills and becoming a self-taught fabricator; if I can’t find what I'm looking for, I will have a go at making it myself. This also means learning new skills along the way which I love.

My adult working life started as a motor mechanic and evolved into a career as a manufacturing/production engineer. I left all this behind when I took early retirement after being made redundant during the lockdown in 2020. It was definitely one of the best decisions I ever made.
But…what is a man to do with so much time on his hands?? It just so happened that I had an interesting chat with an ex-colleague about the work ethics of traditional Japanese sword smiths. They had been featured on a TV program we had both watched. The conversation left me feeling inspired and I thought “I can do that”. I decided to give knife-making a go but I had very few tools to do the job. I ended up using old, blunt files to shape the metal, made my own filing jig, and built a small furnace for the heat treatment. With these limited means, it took around 50 hours to produce my very first knife but I did it!
Many other knives of all shapes and sizes followed, and then I received a request to make a weathervane. Now, I do like a challenge, and that request certainly was! While riding my motorcycle an idea for the weathervane crept into my imagination. Back in the shed, after a lot of trial and error, my first kinetic sculpture was born. I had found my creative side!
I must admit that being creative has its little downsides….my friends, and partner know me to drift off mid-conversation as the head is busy calculating, designing, correcting, adjusting…etc etc. I might get a poke in the ribs with the question “Head in the shed?” “Yep!”.
After making several weathervanes, there was no stopping my imagination, I needed to build bigger and more powerful sculptures. My gallery showcases some of these unique, handcrafted works of art and I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoy making them. 

Please feel free to leave a comment and/or contact me if you have any questions or are interested in buying/co-creating a piece of unique kinetic art.

Been lovely chatting to you but the shed is calling me…! 

Bye for now,

Martin