Roger L. Phillips is a graphic artist, illustrator, and cartoonist living in Putnam County, NY. He worked as a graphic artist and illustrator in the advertising, software, and awards industries and has illustrated books for Scholastic and McGraw-Hill. Roger is also a picture book illustrator and writer. When not playing around with JB Weld and painting little maps for automatons, he rides his motorcycles and cruises around in his classic British car.
Sara Carbone is a picture book writer and is studying figure drawing, portraiture, and sculpture. She wrote and performed a one-woman musical dramedy that celebrates her Hispanic roots and makes a living as a copywriter for the solar industry. A former actress/singer/songwriter, she loves to take long walks with her kids or bike the North County Trailway.
Artist Statement
Imagination and The Machine is a (fictional) collection of once-functioning automata from around the world and through time. With each sculpture, we seek to tell a story, inviting the viewer to leap into a self-contained little world that allows the everyday to drop away. We strive to spark the imagination while also demonstrating the synergy between form and function.
Our work is inspired by real mechanical automatons of the past as well as things we encounter everyday: a funky street sign, a dusty bottle in a thrift shop, a child’s drawing. In a world where art is increasingly influenced by AI and other digital tools, our work is firmly rooted in the analog, the tangible, the visceral experience of viewing something crafted by hand. We kit bash, craft, paint, weld, age and sculpt with metal, leather, beads, plastic, tools, wire, clay, watercolors, epoxy and more. Our process is exacting and highly collaborative. We choose every item, aesthetic direction, object placement with a careful eye toward world building for that particular sculpture.
These automaton sculptures are part movie prop, sculpture and machine, part steampunk, cabinet of curiosities, and museum artifact with a dash of mad scientist. They stretch beyond where modern technology ends, offering objects that go only where imagination can take us.
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Imagination and The Machine 