(This article by David Fickling is taken from International Watch, issue 55, pages 64-67, October 1999, Please visit the Gallery page for more detailed pictures)   It has taken three years of painstaking work to create David Knight's K2, a unique, hand-made pocket watch that is part horology, part sculpture.     Watchmaking is now such a professionalised industry that it can be hard to relate to the qualities of craft and artistry that sustained the first horologists. The quest for precision has created watches that are ever more technical, dependant on miniaturisation and micro-engineering: in the creation of an accurate chronometer, there is little room for whimsy or individual expression. The result is vast companies like ETA turning out thousands of ébauches for watch companies that can no longer afford to compete making their own movements. Even a genuine manufacture like Patek Philippe completes around 60 watches a day, a figure low enough to merit some boasting about Petek's unusually careful workmanship. This means that while watch cases often show a stunning variety of new and unusual styles, movements tend to be similar from one watch to the next: the product of centuries of fine-tuning, their components cannot be altered without adversely effecting their timekeeping. So it is refreshing once in a while to discover a watchmaker who sees the movement as a work of art rather than a piece of technology, hand-making bizarre, idiosyncratic watches that are large, impractical, and absolutely beautiful. David Knight's designs hark back to an almost forgotten era of horology, when a watch was as much about entertainment, philosophy and narrative as it was about telling the time. They are imbued with the spirit of the seventeenth Antiquorum this April (see IWW52): witty, grotesque, and endlessly fascinating. David Knight came to watchmaking late, and almost by chance. After a five-year apprenticeship, he set up business in the early seventies as a watch repairer working extensively for Rolex and Omega. He often dreamed of making a watch of his own, but pressures of the time and money meant his ambition remained unfulfilled until the beginning of the nineties. The story is a familiar one to watchmakers: with ever-increasing popularity of quartz movements, David Knight found work drying up until there were simply not enough clients to sustain a business.     In 1992 he found himself on income support, a situation that would be disastrous to anyone without considerable resources of aptitude and application. Knight took the opportunity to apply the skills he had been honing during 30 years in the watch industry, and set about creating the K1 the first sculptural watch completed in 1996. Having spent most of his working life living under the shadow of the quartz explosion, he had always made efforts to diversify his skills away from conventional horology, and for many years he had practiced lost wax metal casting, a technique that allows complex forms to be cast repeatedly from single moulds.