Sunbeam was a long time in the making. The inspiritational moment for me was when I picked up an old Sunbeam brand cake mixer on hard rubbish, and then I dropped it and broke off the handle, which was made of brittle bakelite. I then removed the handle, and the hole in the top looked like a cockpit, with the lovely 50s design of the mixer forming the body of a retro-futuristic vehicle. Somehow a pair of wheels from the nozzle of a garden blower got fitted, and a single trailing wheel that came from a sewing machine.

But there it stalled, as I wanted a figure in the cockpit, and I could never find one… until years later I found a fairly hideous doll which I’m told is a “Bratz”, and the legs came off and she became a cyborg, a post-human creature. Since I am a fan of Studio Ghibli movies I made a little propellor out of a brass valve because anything can fly if it has a propellor.

I left her sitting on my bench at my shared studio space at Footscray Maker Lab, and Emily the caretaker wandered by. She loved Sunbeam and added her own vision of a leopard print crop top and a hairdo using industrial strength hair lacquer made specially for punks.

Since then Sunbeam has always been around my house, a little ray of sushine with a heart of gold if you can get over the miniature-cyborg-punk-doll vibe.

Before Emily’s makeover…

And after…