Singing Bowl

When played with an iron ball the size of a shot put, Singing Bowl rings with a sound you can feel and hear. Though this seems like a novel acquisition for Tufts, compared to Chambers’s other sculptures, Singing Bowl is relatively tame. His works are known to move, exude scents, change colors, make music, or talk back to their visitors. Chambers grew up playing with materials from both his mother’s art studio and his father’s biology lab, and he is known for resisting the confines of traditional academic disciplines. Today, he plays with 20,000-gallon water tanks, industrial chemicals, computers, and bumper cars in his artistic practice. Feel free to touch the bumps under the rim of this bowl. They give it a sound uniquely its own.

Image: Robert Chambers, American, b. 1958, Singing Bowl,1991. Cast iron, aluminum, magnesium, and stainless steel. Tufts University Permanent Collection. Gift of David and Barbara Slater, 2012.006.