Rick Hale’s clocks are like nothing you’ve ever seen before. They’re wonky, with giant swinging pendulums that power gears and pulleys and then more gears. It’s a combination of tiny and giant, almost resembling a Rube Goldberg machine in its complexity.
But to understand Rick Hale, and why he makes these clocks, you have to start with his father, John. John Hale is pretty much exactly what you imagine when you think of that classic embarrassing, overly enthusiastic dad. John was always laughing, joking, and making up crazy schemes.
John was also a mechanic. He would take Rick into the garage and teach him how to change the oil, fix the brakes, replace a carburetor. He loved building stuff for his kids, no matter how weird. Rick Hale explains:
There’s one random memory from when I was in high school. I was involved in the drum line a lot, and we had to come up with drum solos for the school. And there one night I was at home. He was in the garage for the entire night, I didn’t give much thought to it. But he came back in, and he was visibly excited about something. And he brought me out there...he had this idea that we should play metal ladders for a drum solo. So he had these two huge metal ladders that he had somehow rigged a metal trash can on to the top of. And they were painted jet black, with white Christmas lights on them, glowing. And looking back on it now, it really was pretty epic and awesome. It ended up being probably my favorite drum solo we ever played. But standing there in my garage, I was just like, WHAT?
Through high school and college, John was a huge part of Rick’s life. But then in 2012, he suddenly passed away.
"The hard thing for me was finding ways not to just ignore the fact that he was gone, you know?" Hale says. "That’s something everybody goes through, and I think everybody processes it in different ways. For me, it was just trying to stay conscious of the fact that he wasn’t around anymore, and trying to retain the memories of who he was and what he taught me."
The loss hit Hale hard. He was all of 22 years old, still trying to figure out where his life was going. His dad’s passing, though, was a turning point for him. After spending a few weeks on the east side of the state with his family, Hale headed back to Kalamazoo.
When he got here, he began searching for something to work on, to distract him and help him get through the grief. So he went online.
"I happened to find a clock design online that someone had come up with," he says. "They had all the details for how to cut the gears, everything."
Rick liked the idea of building a clock. Kind of a way to connect a bit with his dad by working with his hands, but still create something that was his own. He already had a wood shop where he built drums, so he headed there. And the process -- of working on this huge project, made of these small pieces, helped him move on.
"It was like a synergy of working on something very precise, and also getting through something that was totally massive. Rather than try to step back and look at the whole big picture of what was happening, I was zooming in on these tiny, little things. Just these tiny physical objects. Gear teeth and arbor rods, all these little things. And in some, weird, contrary way, I think that was what I needed to do to confront this huge issue. It helped to have something that detailed and tiny to focus on. In a way, it was almost as if as I was working on that clock, and polishing the gear teeth, at the same time internally I think things were turning around and things were starting to move into place for who I was going to be going forward."
When Rick finished the clock a few months later, his grief had subsided a bit. But something unexpected happened, too. At the end, Rick looked down at this clock that he made, and he was amazed. He had taken this wood, once alive, and he had shaped and crafted and sanded it into a mechanism that was alive once again, just in a new way.
He wanted to build another. So he spent the next few months reading up on physics, math, and famous clock makers. He started sketching his own designs on paper. And remember those weirdly shaped clocks, from earlier? This is when he finally started designing those.
Inside his wood shop, Hale spins the gears inside one of his earliest creations. This clock looks like a crescent moon, but it’s jam-packed with tons of tiny gears, all powered by a giant pendulum below it, swinging back and forth.
"So if I apply a weight to this string, that’s going to want to pull the gears all in one direction," he says, pushing the gears with his fingers. "So they’re all rotating together, the hands are moving…"
Hale says there’s a reason for all these moving parts. Hale says when he started thinking about clocks -- and time in general -- he realized that so many clocks are simply some lighted numbers on your watch or cell phone. They tell you what you have to do next, but they don’t actually let you be in the moment.
Hale wanted his clocks to be different. He wanted them to be so big, so complicated, that you’ve got to stop what you’re doing, turn to his clock, and just stare.
"Because when someone stops and is just kind of staring, and they see something that they’re not just thinking about but is here in the moment with them, it’s this wonderful moment on one level because there’s nothing else going on in that moment," Hale says. "They’re totally invested in what they’re doing, staring at that weird, wooden contraption."
Now, Hale has an even bigger idea, too. Hale wants to make the biggest clock he can imagine – 12 feet tall – as part of this year’s ArtPrize event in Grand Rapids. The goal is to take his living-in-the-present motto and push it to the next level, by making something so big that it’s impossible for someone to ignore it.
"My main thought was putting something out there that people have never seen before," he says. "And make them stop and stare and just inhabit that space, in that moment, you know? If I can get people to be there and then fully, that’d be cool."
After a few years of finding himself, Hale says these clocks are finally giving him peace – helping him make his own creations, while still continuing his father’s legacy, too.
Hale is also in the final days of a Kickstarter campaign, where he’s raising money to make that big, ArtPrize entry. You can find out morehere.
