Andrew Carson American, b. 1962
My work turns wind into movement and mechanics into poetry, each sculpture is an elegant solution to the challenge of making art that truly interacts with its environment.
Andrew Carson is a kinetic artist who transforms mechanics into elegant, moving sculpture. Drawing on a lifelong fascination with wind and motion, from the powerful Chinooks of his Colorado childhood to his early experiments with whirligigs, he blends engineering precision with artistic design. His work merges hand-crafted components, industrial processes, and carefully calculated mechanics to create sculptures that interact naturally with their surroundings. Inspired by artists like James Eaton, Andrew elevates functional elements such as weathervanes into refined artistic forms. Today, his kinetic installations appear across all fifty states and beyond, valued for their distinctive fusion of movement, craftsmanship, and visual harmony.
Andrew Carson creates kinetic sculptures that blend engineering and artistry, transforming wind and motion into elegant, hand-crafted works that animate and enrich their surroundings
Interactive art, at its core, invites participation. Instead of passively observing, the viewer becomes part of the artwork’s behavior, rhythm, or meaning. It responds to the environment, light, wind, sound, or human presence, so that each experience is slightly different. This sense of exchange is woven deeply into Andrew Carson’s practice as a kinetic sculptor.
Andrew Carson blends mechanics and aesthetics by treating engineering as a form of poetry. Using electronics, illustration, photography, and finely tuned mechanical systems, he seeks elegant solutions to the spatial challenges of both indoor and outdoor environments. Function and form must coexist his sculptures not only move beautifully, they must also withstand weather, rotate smoothly, and maintain structural integrity. Only a fraction of the kinetic ideas he imagines ultimately reach completion, because each requires a level of precision and craftsmanship that merges physics with artistry.
Through his kinetic sculptures, Andrew conveys a lifelong fascination with wind, movement, and the problem-solving nature of design. His childhood in Boulder, Colorado where 100 mph Chinook winds carved memorable landscapes, sparked his early experiments in electronics and measurement. As a teenager, he studied experimental wind turbines and built his own whirligigs, using fabrication skills he picked up repairing bicycles. These early inventions shaped his instinct to turn raw mechanical force into visual poetry.
By 1994, eight years after graduating from the University of Washington, he began merging his whirligig experience with the idea of an elegant, modern weathervane. Inspired by James Eaton, he recognized that industrial processes and interchangeable parts could be not only functional but deeply artistic.
Today, his sculptures appear in all fifty U.S. states and beyond, in both public installations and private collections. Their appeal lies in the way they animate space, translating wind into motion, mechanics into harmony, and engineering into visual balance.
His fabrication process reflects the same blend of precision and imagination. Each piece begins as a rough sketch, evolves into a detailed drawing, and is refined through mechanical calculations and rotation studies. Andrew shapes and engineers every element, pillars, metal components, glass cups, hubs, and transitions, using a combination of industrial techniques and meticulous handcrafting.