A visit to a Wisconsin art festival about 15 years ago helped set Davenport resident Ken Nickels toward his own steampunk creations.
Around 2010, Nickels and his wife visited Art Fair on the Square in Madison, Wisconsin. There, he saw an artist selling steampunk tables so massive they required two people to carry and incorporating objects like car generators. Nearby, the artist also sold a few small steampunk lamps.
The tables were too large, but Nickels was inspired, and he thought he could give the lamps a try.
One day, years later, Nickels finally thought “Hey, what the heck? Let’s try and see what happens.”
For eight years, Nickels, 58, has been constructing lamps using discarded pallets, gauges, regulators, pulleys, pipes and other recycled materials. His lamps fall under the steampunk design style, an approach blending the visuals of the Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution, incorporating visible metal and pipes to create a retro-futuristic appearance.
After five years, Nickels had constructed about 60 lamps, all sitting around his Davenport home. At that point, he knew he needed something to do with them.
That’s when he launched Kelevtov Studios, his lamp-selling business. Kelevtov means “good dog” in Hebrew, and Nickels chose the name after watching the 2006 film “Lucky Number Slevin,” which features a character named Slevin Kelevra.
Nickels first sold his lamps at Beaux Arts in Davenport in 2023. Since then, he has expanded to selling his work at fairs around the Midwest. Nickels, who formerly taught mathematics at Black Hawk College, has now constructed over 100 lamps.
“If you had told me 10 years ago what I’d be doing, I would have laughed in your face that the math teacher was going to do this,” he said.
Nickels does all of the woodworking, soldering, wiring and designing himself, mostly in his garage.
He has always enjoyed building things, he said. He has experience woodworking, and for nearly 20 years, he has been creating stained glass artwork.
Nickels’ lamps combine old with modern. He feels “a sentimentality” about the older, uglier materials he adds to his artwork, he said.
“It’s incredibly satisfying to take something that isn’t the nicest-looking piece and put it together with everything else, and then have it come together,” he said.
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Nickels buys materials from eBay and the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Davenport. By using recycled materials, Nickels can give new life to discarded components, whether a clunky gauge or a mangled wooden pallet, he said. That’s one of the reasons the steampunk style appeals to him.
“I get a lot of people coming in from John Deere and other places, and they say, ‘Oh yeah, we throw this stuff away all the time,’” Nickels said. “It’s heartbreaking, because there’s a lot of stuff being thrown away that you could use.”
Nickels’ process involves trial and error. Sometimes, he doesn’t like the look of a finished lamp, so he keeps tinkering with it until it looks appealing. The hardest part is the wiring, because there’s only so much a wire can bend before the light becomes inoperable, he said.
No two lamps are alike. At times, a lamp takes on a life of its own during the creation process Nickels said. He tries not to force certain components or visions into the end result.
Nickels said will keep building lamps for as long as he can create new, unique designs.
“I don’t want to settle by creating something again. I want everything to be new. Once that stops happening, I think it’s over,” he said.
Nickels doesn’t see that happening any time soon. For his next project, Nickels plans to incorporate stained glass into a lamp. Nickels said most designers add stained glass to the lamp shades, but he wants to integrate stained glass into the background or other unconventional part of the lamp, to create an inventive, interesting visage.
He also could incorporate welding into his art, he said.
Most of Nickels’ lamps range between $200 and $500. He said he understands people don’t go to an art fair to spend that much money on lamps, but he finds meaning in the positive feedback others give him.
Artists put time, effort and parts of themselves into their work, Nickels said. It means so much to hear others appreciate their art, he said.
Often, plumbers and pipe fitters enter his tent and appreciate the electrical work within the lamps. He also sees children wanting to lay their hands across the lamps and play with them. Nickels said he thinks a lot of kids are drained by touchscreens and are looking for something tactile.
“The day we stop getting positive feedback is pretty much the day we stop,” Nickels said.
Nickels will table at the Riverssance Festival of Fine Arts at Lindsay Park in Davenport on Saturday, Sept. 20, and Sunday, Sept. 21.
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