Artist Feature: Jeffrey Sivyer

Time, Music, and Memory

Jeffrey Sivyer’s work is rooted in vinyl — not as nostalgia alone, but as material history. The records he works with are scratched, unplayable, and no longer able to perform their original function. What they still carry, however, is memory.

Jeff grew up during the height of vinyl records, spending much of his youth buying albums and building a personal relationship with music. Years later, when a dear friend gave him a collection of records that could no longer be played, he was reluctant to see them discarded. Instead, he began looking for a way to give them purpose again.

That impulse led him to clocks.

Timepieces felt like a natural extension of music — both measure duration, rhythm, and passage. By embedding clock mechanisms directly into records and pairing them with carefully chosen salvaged materials, Jeff creates one-of-a-kind, functional artworks. Hanging out with local artists pushed the work further, encouraging him to step up the complexity and intention behind each piece.

What Jeff returns to most consistently is the relationship between an album and the additional materials he introduces. There’s a playful intelligence in how a song title, album theme, or cultural reference is echoed through form and salvage. The result is work that feels personal without being sentimental.

“I sometimes feel like I’m not so much creating art,” Jeff says, “as providing a bit of nostalgia to the buyer.”

That sense of recognition is central to his hopes for the work. When someone lives with one of Jeff’s pieces, he wants it to reconnect them with a meaningful time or experience — a first love, a first concert, or a moment when a song truly spoke to them.

Jeff Sivyer’s clocks keep time, but they also hold space — for memory, for music, and for the quiet persistence of things worth keeping.