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with forged beauty. |
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Furnature & Home Accessories Expressing Your Unique Style |
Sculptural Windbiles Powered by wind and imagination |
Bowls & Containers More than just a place to put things |
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Increasingly, my personal work becomes
focused on fine art sculptural works.
This includes smaller pieces - outside the series work in the next section. Significant has been larger pieces, especially a number created for the Elora Sculpture Project. |
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Songs of Distant
Oceans These series pieces have been given their own descriptive section. |
  'Blue Medusa' stands 36 cm / 14 inches, the base is roughly 33 x 28 cm / 13 x 11 inches The glass insert is 18 x 13 cm / 7 x 5 inches |
'Blue Medusa'
mild steel with decorative paint / commercial glass insert Spring 2017 Available - $325 Several years back, I had purchased a set of these deep blue cylinders of blown glass, in three different sizes / proportions. When teaching, I end up with a lot of 1/2 and 3/8 diameter round rod, with long tapering cylindrical points (technique being illustrated). What to do with these? The inspiration was to forge the points into snake like combinations of spirals and reversal curves. These were then bundled together to create a basket like support around the glass form. The metal has been painted here a dark blue to echo the glass. |
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forged angle & mild steel with decorative paint Summer 2008 Available - $200 This piece was created specifically for the Gallery presentation at the annual 'Quad State Roundup' held in September by Ohio Forge & Anvil. This is a large regional blacksmith's event, attracting well over 1000 participants. Every year, in addition to the open categories that display contemporary work, they announce a special theme. That year, the theme was 'hanger'. I normally try to play with theme, concentrating on design concepts, rather than shear technical prowess. 'Hanger for my Autumn Coat & Hat' is a smaller piece, 11 inches at widest and 27 inches long. It uses various application of the shouldering tool to crimp and create 3-D profiles. The piece is painted a very dark brown, with copper highlights in the inside of the 'feathers'. |
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forged and fabricated wrought iron & copper Fall 2008 " The body of the urn is composed of a number of individually hand forged strips of antique wrought iron. I saw samples of the basic technique employed by the Japanese blacksmith Takayoshi Komine at a workshop / demonstration two summers past. (Taka uses the method to make subtle oil lamps employed in the Tea Ceremony.) Actual historic wrought iron has been chosen for the construction because of its excellent forging characteristics and special durability. The metal itself is already some 150 years old — and should easily endure for centuries more. A fitting resting place for the memories of one past beyond us. " For more details on the thought
behind and creation of this object - Go on to a
detailed description
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 Overall View |
 Close up of Glass Core 
Detail of Paintwork |
forged mild steel structural bars with decorative paint hand blown glass by Catherine Vamvakas Lay Fall 2008 "Fire at Heart" was one of a limited number of new sculptural pieces I created in early summer of 2007. I decided this year to focus on producing a number of concept pieces to illustrate directions I had wanted to approach for some time as an artisan. The glass spear at the core of this piece was the original inspiration. It was formed by Toronto glass artist Catherine Vamvakas Lay. She had given me the piece to have a much simpler wall mount made for it. I was struck by its quality, and was driven to forge this fantastic plant form to hold it instead. The subtle colours within the glass suggested the washes of blue, green and yellow used on the metalwork. The piece was sold within hours of its first public display. |
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These two items show the potential of forged steel as a
flexible decorative material. The "Old Wolf Broach" (1990)
is a modern variation on the ancient penanular type, and
was made as one of a matched pair. Despite it's small size
(about 2 1/2"), it uses a large number of individual
techniques. It is often MORE difficult to work on this
small scale, as it is hard to localize the heated area to
control the effects! The punched Dragon Head (8/91) also uses a number of forming steps. This piece was inspired by a pair of Celtic Iron Age fire dogs found in Wales. It forms one end of a long toasting fork. I have not worked very much with 3-D punching, a technique that also exploits the 'plastic' nature of the hot metal. |
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