Isn’t it our dependency on time quite troubling? All these persisting seconds ticking away. What are we missing? What’s on the to-do list? Digital and analog clock faces reminding us everywhere on phones, computers, and watches. Time constantly stressing and pressing us on. Mellow Clock by Joe Parr presents a new take: time as sculptural playfulness, time as ever-changing form, a timepiece that is an intersection of art and design. ’As the clock moves, its composition changes’ says Joe Parr. ’The rounded hands and colors shift in the light throughout the day revealing a continuously changing character. Its sculptural shape gives the clock presence which stands out gracefully, without being overpowering, and integrates well with the rest of an interior.’
Mellow Clock is surely an artwork, and at the same time a truly functional sculpture, according to Joe Parr. All made in aluminum with concave shapes, and with a silent pendulum slowly moving back and forth. ’At first the clock can seem very new and abstract, but after just a short while of use, it becomes easy to tell the time. As with all my designs, I ensured it is a useful practical object for the home, but I also acknowledge usefulness is more than functionality and needs to react to our lived experience.’
As a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Joe Parr brought children playground inspiration indoors to the grown-ups. His design skill developed earlier on while working at Herman Miller. ’Time is very dependent on how we are feeling as we move through it, and it fascinates me to think we can alter that state. When the pandemic hit, time seemed to stop for a while as we were stuck in our homes most of the day, yet when we look back that period seem to have moved eerily quickly.’
’This is fantasy and function in one superb object,’ says Anders Färdig, founder of Design House Stockholm ’our trademark values combined in strikingly original clock. Choose the form, then the colors.’ Mellow Clock evokes the kinetic art of Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp, Lygia Clark, Naum Gabo, as well as Theo Jansen’s Sandbeest. Joe Parr adds his take questioning our obsession with time in his intriguing way. Can removing the clock face, the numbers and all that demanding exactness, also transform our relation to time in favor for a Scandinavian Slow Living with ample space for Hygge and Fika? Mellow Clock fuses function with a striking kinetic art that will reconnect us with the present and life itself.
