Weathered copper Most of the weathered copper sheets I use have an historical connection to places near where I work and live. Copper has been used as roofing for centuries and is one of the most travelled of recycled materials both as money and as utensils. So any used copper today is likely to have deep roots in the history of trade and migration of people I began with the roofing of St. Nicolai church in Svendborg, which I bought from the coppersmith on the roof as he was replacing it. Later, a customer who bought one of the last mobiles made from this roofing put me in touch with Paul Lindeg rd., a copper roof specialist in Copenhagen. He was in fact on the roof of the Danish parliament when he took my cell phonecall I got up on the roof with him two days later and bought a stack of sheets from him It's been twelve years now and customer interest remains high. The copper sheets turned out to have a unique history with a background in a fire catastrophe in 1884 a suffraget in 1917, national collection appeals, and a Prime Ministers radio speech to the country. A story H. C. Andersen might have written a fable about. The mobile pictured is made from these sheets and is called Flame. It is an unusual candleholder as it throws both light and its own shadow around as it turns. Price 475 DKK (ca 69 EU plus shipping and handling).

Birch plywood The Finnish birch plywood I use varies in thickness from 0.4 mm to 4 mm and up depending on the size of the mobile. An environmentally friendly advance in technology comes from Koskisen who now produce a product which is cross laminated using a biodegradable bond. Otherwise all of the plywoods I use are also Finnish and forest certified under European law and are produced with water based epoxy glues. The pictured mobile is Stairway to Heaven, 0.6mm birch ply. ca 45 cm in diameter cut with scissors from a single piece Shown at Cafe Aroma Svendborg Denmark. Price 300 DKK (ca 43 Euro plus shipping and handling).

Stainless steel In my opinion a precious metal! I usually work with sheets of 1 mm or less in thickness. Wave Flying is 90 cm in diameter and is made from a single pice of 1,2 mm stainless steel. It is displayed in my daughter Helenes apartment in Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Natural materials Pictured in our herb garden is a small limb mobile, forest detritus emeritus, with a little help from winter's artistry! The Chinese text is "beautiful", December 19th 2009 The non human natural forces fascinate and tempt me to imitate or to include them in my own natural work. I love to try to be open for surprises, when I collect and split my firewood. A double branching, when split gives rich and texturful designs, with a mirror image to play with. My career as a maker of mobiles began after a collection of driftwood on a beach on Curacao in the Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean in 1969. Driftwood lay in endless waves of dried, bleached and naked structure, just to assemble them! I use stones as balance and counterweight or pieces of freight on "cargo" mobiles, but have never hung stones together. You can see a couple of white stones in the dark cave of the piece of firewood from Johannes Larsen museum!