‘Fish, birds, leaves and even mermaids and dragons take flight through Jay’s mesmerising creations conjured up in his garage workshop near Dundrennan,’ says Carol Hogarth, who describes cabinet maker Jay Rubenstein’s ethereal wooden mobiles as a captivating combination of artistic vision and a feat of engineering
Nature, poetry, and puzzles are the inspiration behind Jay Rubinstein’s ethereal wooden mobiles which combine a unique artistic vision and a feat of engineering.
Fish, birds, leaves and even mermaids and dragons take flight through Jay’s mesmerising creations conjured up in his garage workshop near Dundrennan.
A trained cabinet maker who has worked as a teacher and in IT, Jay had been making furniture for friends and family and was creating exquisite little wooden boxes to sell when he and his wife Carol moved to their rural home in Dumfries & Galloway 10 years ago.
“I made my very first mobile a year or so later. I’d been looking at bits of veneer I had lying around the workshop and thought they looked like the pages of a book.
“They reminded me of a poem, A Martian Sends A Postcard Home by Craig Raine, so I began making a mobile of books gradually turning into birds.
“Then I just started getting carried away with it. Mobiles gradually interested me more and more.”
Jay still takes poems, songs, or folk stories as a starting point for his mobiles. Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins led to various iterations of fish made of birds.
He created an ambitious ‘Tyger’ based on the famous Blake poem. A mobile of flying geese came from Scottish singer/songwriter Karine Polwart’s Pocket of Wind Resistance album. And a poem called Invisible by Imtiaz Dharker, in which a swan studies its reflection in the water, seeing in the image a lost lover, inspired a large mobile of swans.
“I’m often quite drawn to things that combine images – the Tyger made of flames, the Mermaid made of fish, fish made of birds…they tell stories of transformations.”
Jay also sees his projects as puzzles to solve: “I’m helped by the restrictions of the materials I use. The colours are decided by the veneers I can get, for example, so I work with the natural colours.
“There’s a puzzle part of my brain that loves the challenges, like how to make a movement that works the way I want it to. If I’m lucky and it works right and I like the way it looks, it’s very satisfying.”
Jay, who studied at the London College of Furniture in the 1980s, uses 0.6mm thick wood veneer to give each piece of his mobiles their crucial combination of strength and lightness. These are layered and shaped over a mould, or former, before being placed in a vacuum bag while the glue sets.
“For each piece I think about different colours produced by various timbers, the shapes it is possible to make and the shapes it is possible to suggest, the stringing of the pieces and the movement available in the final piece. Finally, there is the balance of all the pieces so that they hang correctly.”
Jay has taken part in Dumfries & Galloway’s Spring Fling open studios weekend since 2019 and visitors love the opportunity to come to his busy studio and watch his fascinating process.
He enjoys being part of Spring Fling – and Upland Made art and craft fair in Dumfries – although it was his initial rejection by the Spring Fling selection panel when he first applied, that he is most thankful for: “I owe a massive debt of gratitude to my Spring Fling rejection,” he says. “I received detailed feedback saying I hadn’t taken this idea to its full conclusion. That made a big difference and helped me develop the concept further.”
It was holidays in Galloway that led to a permanent move from Northamptonshire for Jay and Carol, after Carol spotted their home, which is nestled in hills between Dundrennan and Auchencairn.
“We stayed in Dalbeattie the first time we came up on holiday, and loved it. We knew we wanted to be in this part of the region.
Too few people know how beautiful it is.
“Carol found this place and put an offer in before I’d even seen it. It’s been wonderful living here – the people and sense of beauty.”
After his training, Jay ran a small furniture making business and then taught Design Technology in schools. He later moved out of London to Northamptonshire and retrained in computers, running IT networks for schools, while continuing his woodworking as a hobby.
After moving to Dumfries & Galloway, he became involved with MOOL (Massive Outpouring of Love) a Dumfries-based charity set up to help displaced people, refugees, and asylum seekers, and helped launch the town’s award-winning International Street Food Festival.
Jay’s mobiles continue to attract the attention of art galleries around the country, including the Old Courthouse in Ambleside and The Whitehouse Gallery in Kirkcudbright, which he says has been hugely supportive from the start.
He’s keen to continue exhibiting with Spring Fling and Upland and would like to take on more commissions, particularly for public, therapeutic places.
“I would like to do some larger pieces for public spaces. I’d particularly like to explore pieces for places where we want people to feel calm. People say they find the mobiles calming, contemplative.”
Still “happy doing mobiles”, Jay says he is “playing more with suggesting rather than defining” concepts: “It’s about puzzles partly, and about developing ideas and trying to make them interesting.
“If you isolate any one part of my process, you would say ‘why is this enjoyable?’. But overall if, at the end, you get something that you can look at yourself and like, it’s a great pleasure.”
• www.jrubinstein.co.uk
