About the authors

ELIZABETH KING is a sculptor and stop-motion filmmaker whose works address the human/machine interface and the anatomy of emotion. Her most recent solo show, “Radical Small,” was on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) from February 2017 through January 2018. “Double Take,” a documentary film on her work by Olympia Stone, premiered in New York at the National Academy of Design in 2018 and later aired on PBS stations nationwide. Her first book Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit) was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1999. Her prior essays on the monk include “Perpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine That Prays” in Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, (Jessica Riskin, ed., University of Chicago Press, 2007) and “Clockwork Prayer: A Sixteenth-Century Mechanical Monk” in Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts (2002). She is a professor emerita at Virginia Commonwealth University where she taught from 1985 to 2015 in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media.

W. DAVID TODD is Associate Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Trained in his native England, he has been a practicing clockmaker since the late 1960s, and is an expert on sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English, European and American clockwork. In 1973 he was accepted as a Craft Member of the British Horological Institute, and in the same year became a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in London (a craft guild chartered by King Charles I in 1631), advancing to Liveryman in 1976. In 1978 the Smithsonian Institution hired him as museum specialist and conservator of timekeeping, where he worked under Silvio Bedini, Otto Mayr, and Carlene Stephens. One of his first tasks at the Smithsonian was to examine the newly acquired automaton friar, which he cared for and kept in running condition for the next thirty years. He has conserved and restored some of the world’s finest early clocks and automata, among them the clocks Thomas Jefferson commissioned for Monticello. In 2012 he finished making an iron weight-driven wall clock patterned on sixteenth-century German tradition, using only the tools and methods of that age.

ROSAMOND PURCELL is an artist known for her photographs of specimens and objects in natural history museums worldwide. Her books include Finders Keepers: Eight Collectors (with Stephen Jay Gould), 1992; Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, 1997; Dice: Deception, Fate and Rotten Luck (with Ricky Jay), 2002; Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, 2003; Egg and Nest (with René Corado and Linnea S. Hall), 2008; and Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (with Michael Witmore), 2010. In 2011 her recreation of the famous seventeenth-century wonder cabinet of Ole Worm was permanently installed in the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. A documentary film by Molly Bernstein, “An Art that Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell,” premiered in the U.S. in 2016. “Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside,” a retrospective exhibition of her work from the 1960s to the current day opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art in September, 2022.