Emery Blagdon made every one of his wire assemblages and geometric paintings on wood scraps as part of a whole. Together, they were what he called The Healing Machine, a massive installation, assembled in a shed outside his home in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, that was intended to harness the energy of Earth to alleviate pain and prevent suffering. With the barest of tools, usually just needle-nose pliers and a hammer, he wove and wound baling wire, folded aluminum foil, and bundled discarded objects; he added details in paint, the minerals of which he considered curatively powerful. By the time of his death, in 1986, the shed held hundreds of chandeliers of worked metal illuminated with strings of Christmas-tree lights and painted light bulbs in repurposed coffee cans.

Blagdon had previously wandered far from Nebraska, where he was born in the small town of Callaway in 1907, riding boxcars and picking up work as a seasonal laborer, as he was known as an inventive and adept mechanic. He returned to his home state in the mid-1930s, when his mother was dying of cancer, and soon witnessed his father also taken away by the disease. Perhaps frustrated by the lack of human skills to stop their difficult declines, he looked for a way to channel the therapeutic electricity that he believed was below the planet’s surface.

Although Blagdon largely worked in a solitude that increased over the three decades that he devoted to The Healing Machine and became more of an eccentric local figure, his connection with an area pharmacist named Dan Dryden led to his Healing Machine being saved from obscurity. He had first visited Dryden to acquire mineral salts for his ever-evolving work, and Dryden was stunned when he saw the space, especially as it contrasted with the isolation of the surrounding cornfields. After Blagdon died, Dryden and his friend Don Christensen stewarded the preservation of The Healing Machine, with much of it acquired by the Kohler Foundation in 2004.

Allison C. Meier, 2025

Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).