Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch’s fascination with alterna-art materials began as a little girl when she’d follow her dad around hardware stores inspecting bins of nuts and bolts…Over the years, the Needham self-taught artist and mother of two has found ways to combine hardware with traditional art materials such as beads and yarn for one-of-a-kind teapots, urns, and lingerie.

I started working with typewriters in 1994 while living in a small town in Iowa. They’ve always been intensely interesting to me (when I was about ten years old I wanted to take apart my mother’s 1920’s Underwood), so it was natural that, having a typewriter and some free time, I would want to dissect one. I think of the typewriter as a product of nature- it was designed by minds immersed in nature around them, and mimicked the curves, geometry, and physical processes abounding in nature. Though it is cold metal created by human hands, the typewriter is just as much a natural material as stone or wood. I concentrate on bringing this fascination with the raw material and interest in science and science fiction together in the subtleties of the human form.