When I was about eight years old, there was a housing development being built near the Minneapolis suburb I grew up in. For some reason, they dug all the basements and left the huge piles of dirt for a long time. I and my friends would spend hours building trails and tunnels for marbles to run down. After they finally hauled all the dirt away I would occasionally experiment with other materials, a hose, pieces of wood or a model train track.

Much later, as I was going to college at Moorhead State University here in Minnesota, My ceramics instructor gave my class an assignment to make something non-functional with the clay. I remembered my childhood playing with marbles in the dirt and made a sculpture with tracks and tunnels much like that first pile of dirt.

I spent the next fifteen years as a potter making mainly functional ceramics, selling them around the country at art shows. Occasionally I would work on another piece with balls rolling through it. It was always marginally successful at best. Clay shrinks, warps and can crack as it dries. The ball doesn't roll the same on wet clay as it does on the finished piece. I would end up making numerous pieces and having to throw them out because they didn't work right.
Then one day it just dawned on me "Just because I'm a potter doesn't mean I have to work in clay" It sounds pretty simple now but it ended up life changing for me.

I knew how to weld, having built most of my own pottery equipment, so I just started building sculptures with the materials I had. After a few years of making a sculpture every now and then, I had a number of them sitting around the house. My wife, Deb, convinced me I should take them to some art shows. (She was probably looking down the road and imagining what our house would be like if I kept making them and not selling them.) I was very hesitant about it though. I had never seen any thing like this. I thought it was just my thing and no one else would be interested in my moving sculptures.

Six months after my first show I no longer had time to do any pottery. Since then the demand for my work has only grown.

The reactions and crowds drawn to my work still amazes me. I live an artists dream life.

Jeffrey Zachmann