META-FORMATION: EXPERIMENTS AND RITUALS

EXCERPT:

“Forged objects materially encapsulate the hammer blows, flows of white-hot plasticity, and performative movement of the making process. They possess the potential to engage with the viewer in a significant way. By visually suspending the movement, force, and pressure enacted by the maker into the metal, they draw the viewer’s eye into the process. Almost like viewing a frame of stop motion in the round, the mind’s eye is compelled to visually conjure the processual before and the prospective after, even in its most refined and formal expressions. Forged metal’s material potential to act as an agent of engagement, to reach back to the viewer, is what fascinates me, as a scholar of contemporary craft and design, and excites me about the future of the field and the medium.

It has been an incredible honor to be involved in the jurying process of Meta Formations: Experiments and Rituals, a timely and imperative survey exhibition of contemporary forged metalwork. Media-specific surveys of this kind have historically functioned to gauge the temperature of the field and its makers at a particular moment, documenting the major shifts as well as working towards advancing critical scholarship and discourse. This exhibition marks a formative moment for the field, one that is characterized by work that embraces the substantial history and traditions of iron and steel, yet forges beyond it, allowing for unprecedented conceptual expression. 

In Meta Formations, abstract, inflated steel sculptures are shown alongside finely wrought gardening tools while raised mokume vessels, with their intricate, layered knots of patterning, are displayed alongside steel and copper animal masks with articulated jaws. The diverse expressions in the selection are united, of course by their exacting craftsmanship and demonstration of technical skill, but also by their emphasis on material exploration.

In the December 1970 issue of Craft Horizons magazine, Ronald Pearson published an article entitled, “The Contemporary Blacksmith: 1970,” which addressed the state of the field during the height of the studio craft movement. The article used a contemporaneous exhibition, The Iron Show, organized by Shop One in Rochester, as a lens to analyze contemporary blacksmithing at the time. The show consisted of decorative functional works as well as significant examples of sculptural experimentation by artists like Albert Paley. Interestingly, many of the same material considerations and drives to unite concept and form that were discussed still ring true today. The article states, “the plasticity of white hot iron invites spontaneity - a kind of direct action between man, fire, hammer, and metal. It is an elemental relationship of muscle and eye to material and form…I am learning that the finished work may or may not possess an illusion of plasticity, and that one’s approach to working the material can be either plastic or rigid.” Both Johannes Postlmayr’s Distorted Geometric Series and Joshua Goss’s Ductile Compression series in Meta Formations have advanced that conversation, liminally inhabiting the spaces between design and improvisation, rigidity and plasticity - all while foregrounding concept.”