I have a friend who told me that she is always dreaming of Paris, which inspired this sculpture, made more of Paris dreams, than Paris reality.

This is not the Paris captured in so many souvenir snow domes, this is the Paris in my dreams. When I see the Eiffel tower, I just think: if they’d only made TWO of them, they could have created an awesome Ferris wheel.

Sure there’s some logistics involved there, and getting the building permit for a second tower would be difficult, to say the least. If they’d only thought of that at the time, but Ferris wheels had not yet been invented. and the tower was built in 1887-1889, while the Ferris wheel was introduced at the 1893 world fair. (Now for some truly deep and deliberate trivia, one of the FIRST SNOW GLOBES ever documented was from 1889, and it contained a model of the Eiffel tower. Nikola Tesla built his first radio station in 1894. Blows my mind.  (What does Tesla have to do with this? It’s simple: I never avoid an opportunity to mention him. He is a contemporary of the Eiffel Tower, and the Ferris Wheel. One would have needed Tesla to figure out how to power the Twin Eiffel Ferris Wheel, or look for a really large hamster. So there.)

Back to Dreaming of Paris, the snowglobe. Since it appears unlikely that anyone is going to build a second Eiffel tower soon, I decided to build it here in a manageable scale — less than two inches wide, and less than 3 inches tall. It has a tiny Ferris wheel between two models of the Eiffel Tower, carrying buckets of metallic flowers made of watch parts, gears and re-purposed jewelry. The base is embellished with brass filigree ornamentation, in my imagined style of turn-of-the-last century Paris. Brass plate engraved with “Dreaming of Paris” is affixed to the base. A dusting of gold will swirl through the sculpture when the globe is shaken.

Custom waterglobe (snowglobe) with 2.5″ tall Ferris Wheel made of the Eiffel Tower and carrying baskets of metal flowers.