What I will share

‘Ferroseed’ Sculptures

There are distinct, interrelated elements to my practice of blacksmithing. Different hats I wear. I make objects you may expect of a ‘blacksmith’, architectural products: gates, railings, pergolas. I teach, sharing my knowledge and experience with students coming into the discipline. I engage in what my wife affectionately calls ‘recreational blacksmithing’, attending and contributing to forging events at home and abroad. And I make sculptural works for exhibition. Each element of practice nourishing and benefitting one another.

A desire to describe the process of blacksmithing practice in its essence is my impulse to explore hot forged steel through sculptural form, I do so in order to express steel’s potential as a medium. My vocabulary of form is drawn from research into historical technical process; I frame these techniques within objects informed by contemporary craft concept.

The ‘Ferroseed’ sculptures start from the question ‘if metal was a plant, how would it grow?’ This impulse springs from a parallel fascination with the logic and progression inherent in how things grow in the natural world and the logic and progression in the construction of a multi-elemented metal object. In both cases, each element, component, fixing has to be beneficial to the structure and influences the visual aesthetic. The sculptures’ components are made from mild steel using traditional forging process - fire, hammer and anvil. The resultant forms are not a representational depiction of a specific plant; but encapsulate the progression and energy of a plant’s growth.