Blacksmithing : TEXTURES OF STEEL

We go back to 1996, Plymouth College of Art and Design moved on from doing jewellery making and the silversmithing into the architectural metalwork department and for the final show we had to come up with a body of work. And I was really interested at art college about the plasticity of steel. Now over 800, 850 degrees steel becomes malleable, up to a thousand degrees it becomes extremely malleable, very soft, very much like plasticine. So I started to explore the idea of mark making and creating textures into the surfaces of sheets of steel. About 25 years I sort of forgot about it and it wasn't really until 2019 perhaps, 2020, something around then, I was asked by my friend Matt from Kin Collective, who's Matt's also my agent, to produce a small dish for a Japanese restaurant in London. It just took me back 20, 25 years straight back to art college, straight back to that exploration of the texture of the surface of steel. This particular bowl just resonated with me so much and I think then you know really for the last four years I've been exploring more and more surface texture and how using different tools, making different mark and the combinations, how you can produce really really interesting pieces. Two main ways I'm producing textures at the moment, one is directly hammer and anvil, in principle the traditional way to do it. Don't want to overheat the steel, there's quite a fine balance between overheating the stainless and producing too much scale, we get a kind of negative effect then. It's very controlled, the patterns look incredibly random but actually there's a lot of, not so much planning, but there's a lot of concentration. You can put a wrong hammer strike in the place on certain patterns and the whole part is ruined. It's like controlled chaos. A little bit about the nature of how steel behaves when it's heated up, so like I said when you go over a certain temperature it becomes very much like plasticine, it becomes squashable, malleable and there's quite a difference between the two techniques. One is hitting a piece of steel to create a mark and the other one is compressing it to dig a tool into the surface of it. Using hydraulic presses, I've got two coal iron hydraulic presses from America, amazing machines, very controllable. When you hit a piece of metal, I guess an anvil, there's an equal push back, the force is going into the metal but it's also pushing back again, the anvil's kind of pushing back up again. So that is very useful for some things, but for some of the marks that I want to make, actually when you heat up a piece of steel and you just apply pressure, it will just keep on digging into the surface much more effectively. It's also highly controllable, it can really be very precise or as random as you want. The nice thing about the presses is that we can produce custom tooling, different types of tooling, to produce different profiles. So you can have a flat plate, you can have a plate with an edge, you could have a shallow dish. I've become really interested in what happens on the edges of the textures. When you start to play around with those shapes and those forms, then it's taking me in a whole new direction, a completely different direction that I wouldn't have really thought I was going to go into. It's much more sculptural, textures are becoming sort of more extreme and more organic. And I think when I look back to the pieces from art college, you know, 30 odd years ago, I can see the spark of that interest of taking a texture up to the edge of a square, but not over the edge of it. And you get these lovely lines in these patterns, or putting a mark right on the edge, half on and half off. And then you get a different result. Artistically, even emotionally, it's really interesting to see this sort of continuation, and it's like going back again to the beginning.