This summer, visitors to the Willis Museum and Sainsbury Gallery in Basingstoke can meet the Gizmobots, quirky robot creations of artist Mark Haig, brought to life from recycled scrapyard and skip finds.
GIZMOBOTS is an exciting, family-friendly, free exhibition which runs from Thursday 10 August to Sunday 15 October and tells the story of the Gizmobots, bringing together artist and engineer extraordinaire Haig’s robots, both large and small.
Featured on BBC One’s Money for Nothing, Gizmobots are “found object robots” that start life as ordinary, discarded items discovered in second-hand shops, skips, car boot sales and scrap yards. Haig carefully crafts the parts to create unique characters, each with their own personality and humorous story.
As a child, Haig used to sit in front of his parents’ electric fire making robots and spaceships out of cogs, wheels and bits of wood that his dad brought back from his job as a clock repairer. Fast forward to today and he is on a mission to teach the younger generation the value of re-purposing, whether that’s through repairing or re-imagining old objects into whimsical sculptures. While many of Haig’s creations are decorative, he also makes practical robots which have functions like speakers, radios and lamps.
Alongside past creations, GIZMOBOTS features a brand-new, giant robot made on site by Haig, as well as a robot inspired street-art commission by prolific artist, Dan Wilson. Wilson has responded to Haig’s robotic creations through art, creating a large-scale tryptich – an artwork comprising three panels - which cleverly displays the Gizmobots meeting robots from different eras. The expressionist backgrounds on the tryptich serve as abstract landscapes where the characters interact, while the obviously hand-painted style both reflects and contrasts with the supposed clean and binary nature of the digital world.
The exhibition is accompanied by creative, family-friendly robot-inspired activities including make-your-own masks, puppets and cardboard tube robots to keep the cogs turning for little ones throughout the summer holidays. To find out more about the exhibition and to book events, please visit https://www.hampshireculture.org.uk/event/gizmobots.