Artist Blacksmithing on Display at the Metal Museum

FORGE, a UK exhibit making its only US stop in Memphis, is currently on display at the Metal Museum.

June 4, 2018

12:00 PM

Should you find yourself presented with an opportunity to get up close and personal with a vat of molten metal, I humbly suggest that you seize it — the opportunity, mind you, not the blazing-bright metal, from which one ought maintain a respectful distance.

Until scarcely more than a year ago, I worked for a company that manufactured copper and brass products — pipes, fittings, forgings, rods, valves, you name it: the veins and arteries of offices and autos, houses and hospitals that most of us ignore until water is flowing out of somewhere it shouldn’t, or not flowing out of somewhere it should.

Most days, my corporate-headquarters work put me nowhere near the darkly lit, green-flame-licked, Hephaestus-ruled noisy cauldrons of the manufacturing plants. But occasionally, behind a pair of safety glasses, I saw copper turned and flipped and formed, one part underworld magic and one part Play-Doh Fun Factory. We know that metal is formed somewhere, by someone or something — but seeing it in the glowing, ignited process is something else entirely, rather like being a visitor from a planet of only ice and watching for the first time as it melts to water.

Grace Stewart, director of collections & exhibitions, uncrates the FORGE exhibit. Here, she places the roof on one of Stephen Yusko’s vessels, Reliquary: Solitude, 2017.

FORGE, on display in the Gasparrini Galleries at the Metal Museum through August 19th, presents the forged metalwork of some 15 contemporary artist blacksmiths. The exhibit, a collaboration between Hereford College of Arts, in the West Midlands, UK, and the Ruthin Craft Centre, in Ruthin, North Wales, is traveling internationally, and makes its only U.S. stop in Memphis.

Form and function, beauty and utility: the work in FORGE explores the spaces between these notions and traditions. A metal tool may appear destined to be ever thus, ever itself, but in FORGE, we watch it transform into something else entirely. From noun — furnace, hearth, an anvil beside — to verb: to forge ahead, to innovate. To transform.

Nils Hint’s Cutlery, for instance, takes ready-made forged iron components — pliers, wrenches, the sort of thing you might find hanging in a grimy garage — and elongates their handle-ends until they turn graceful, morphs them into spoons, ladles, delicate forks and knives, then gilds the new ends, the ones ‘worthy’ of display, until they gleam. Depending on, quite literally, how you handle the Estonian blacksmith’s dual-sided implements, you will find them to be either utilitarian or opulent. The hand is the furnace that turns the metal into what it shall be.

In his Brick series, St. Petersburg-based Egor Bavykin folds sheets of flat, thin metal into intricate, drapily curved patterns, like paper or pastry, then slices the stacks into the shape of bricks. Though forged of steel and copper, Bavykin’s bricks appear to be still bendable and bending, still alive within their six-sided cuboids.

A Swedish maker and a New Zealander art historian, Tobias Birgersson and Damian Skinner, offer “15 Ways of Thinking About a Blacksmith” in the back of the exhibit catalogue. One cannot help but be put in mind of Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and in particular the lines: “I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.”

Stephen YuskoSignal Box: MT, 2017

Forged, machine and fabricated steel, stainless steel

The beauty of intentions or the beauty of functions, one might ask of this work, the blacksmith forging the metal, or just after. Skinner asks, “What is your intention?” He expands, “Everyone should be forced to ask themselves this question, especially people who are going to make giant metal objects that the rest of us have to deal with.”

FORGE includes a maquette, or scale model, of Francisco Gazitua’s giant Rosa Nautica, which at 20 meters high has stayed put in Toronto. In Gazitua’s description of his own work, metal possesses its own strain of cool, quiet intelligence, with “one advantage over ours,” writes the Chilean sculptor. “Steel lives in peace in its own tranquility, in the silent coherence of its crystals and mathematical formulae . . . the silence of matter, its strict laws of functionality.” Rosa Nautica seems one part tall ship, one part pocket-watch gear, one part water droplet, and all parts somehow inevitable.

I walked through the gallery at the Metal Museum while FORGE was being installed: a beachcomber’s pleasure. Empty pedestals, freshly painted, drying, awaiting their forged metal occupants. Glass cases on standby for one final sparkle-inspection. Big blue-green quilts spread across the floor to provide a comfortable napping spot for the sculptures, before their ascensions onto the pedestals, beneath the cases.

Laid gently on its side to float upon one of the quilts, like some kelp-spangled length of driftwood bobbing downriver, was a piece in forged steel by Ambrose Burne, a Welsh-born artist trained as a blacksmith and working in Kingston, England. Ferro Seed #1, 2016, unmistakably though indeterminately organic-looking, is a rhythmic shudder of curled tendrils along a central curved steel limb, or stem.

Burne envisions his work by gathering information in nature — shells and plants and other forms — then drawing what he gathers, analyzing structure and pattern. “To manipulate these drawings into steel,” he comments, “I seek out methods of manipulating the metal: drawing out, spreading, bending, punching, that will emphasise the essential qualities of the original form.” What results is a piece of steel, heavy and hard, formed and forged by human design, that retains the bright motion of the ‘original’ version designed by nature.

Nancy Cook, exhibitions manager, and Kevin Burge, preparator, install FORGE at the Metal Museum.

Questions of ‘home’ and familiarity flow through the metals of FORGE. Takayoshi Komine’s work possesses a tenderness, a sweetness one might not associate with metalwork. The Japanese artist creates gentle, softly shallow bowls of copper that seem almost like unfired folds of clay, or even freshly rolled sheets of pastry dough. Komine’s Paper Knife series offers delicate hand-sized blades, hatched with lines and smudges that suggest ancientness, with looped handles a person might take to be carefully folded leather, but are actually metal themselves. The knives with their inviting handles cue an unspecified nostalgia for an unknown home where these might first have appeared, were they the ancient implements they appear.

Another genus of tool appears in Leszek Siko´n’s work. Having heard about church bells smelted to make weapons during World War I, Siko´n went on to learn that any available steel was confiscated in wartime to be melted and reformed as weapons. Siko´n decided to reverse the arrow from tool of creation to tool of war: he creates Shell Tools by forging ammunition from the First and Second World Wars into attenuated shovels and trowels, a scythe, all handled in hickory wood curved to glove but not obscure the steel itself. Sikon’s tools of art, all forged by traditional blacksmithing techniques, are displayed alongside the shells and muskets they once were. The solidity of the tools on display here is belied by the presence of muskets beside them, reminders that even the most hardened steel object can be reimagined and reformed at any moment: now plowshares, now swords, and back again to plowshares (which are now art).

Daniel Randall’s series of house-like sculpted structures are both familiar and playfully strange: his simple-seeming steel houses atop elongating steel legs formed like bridges and culminating in darkly stained wood feet, that themselves seem more like river stones. Randall’s work arrives plucked from a world with variable levels of gravity: the bridges beneath his small iron houses either groan and flatten toward earth, or narrow to a concentrated point, and perch.

Because Stephen Yusko’s small steel and glass vessels were not yet under glass when I visited, I watched as their tops, or roofs, were positioned. Yusko has included small guide marks so that the roof of each structure fits perfectly, snugly — fits, that is to say, like home fits.

FORGE was curated by Delyth Done, leader of the Artist Blacksmithing BA course at Hereford College of Art. Drawing on a tradition of artist blacksmithing, the exhibition asks where the legacy of innovative metalworking, which took shape especially during the Industrial Revolution in Wales and England, finds itself in the twenty-first century, and around the globe.

In Done’s curator’s overview, she writes, “In recent years, the practice of artist blacksmiths has transformed. Contemporary artist blacksmiths are creating original and cohesive bodies of work, works which engage not only with the practices and forms of traditional blacksmithing, with its focus on material, process and function, but also with many broader cultural, environmental, and socio-political conversations . . . giving focus to an international community of artist blacksmithing driven by ideas and concept as much as by process and material.”

The Metal Museum will host a gallery talk on Sunday, June 24th, featuring curator Delyth Done and some of the artists whose work is represented. A reception will start at 3 p.m. with the gallery talk beginning at 4 p.m. More information is available at metalmuseum.org/forge. The Museum is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays from 12 noon to 5 p.m.; admission is free to Tennessee residents, with current state-issued photo ID, each Thursday. If you have not been to the Metal Museum before, or have not visited in a while, do not leave without venturing into the blacksmith shop out back, or strolling through the gardens, with their distinctive southern view of the Harahan Bridge and the Mississippi River’s northward bend.

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