Skip to main content

chasing

Chasing--repeatedly hitting shaped metal tools with a hammer--allows me to draw on metal, with the advantage that the final metal picture can be a flat canvas or formed into full life-like relief. New work is always underway--the best place to view this is currently on my instagram profile.

I recently made 496 bronze flowers for a Plum Tree Screen in a contemporary Chinese tea-room, designed and built by Cory Barkman. You can see pictures on Cory's Facebook page, and in my blog posts.

Cory Barkman's Contemporary Chinese Tea-room, commission for a private home, Saskatoon, Canada.

We have 31 x 21 x 2 inch version of this sculpture available for purchase, featuring 44 unique chased bronze flowers, mounted on hand-carved stained walnut, and powder-coated aluminium. Mounting and installation materials will be based on the location. Please contact me for more details.

Repousséd and chased bonze flowers - ready to be pierced out from the background metal.
 
All About Iris is a wall-mounted sculpture, with three panels in aluminium, brass, and copper. I made a short 'making of video' describing the design process, and the ideas that inspired the piece:
 
  
 My 17-piece installation of chased and repousséd equine studies, In Dreams, was shown by the Alberta Craft Council in their Well in Hand exhibition (Edmonton, Canada). The on-line exhibition is available here (from image 74 onwards).
 

Please contact me to enquire about developing your story into a highly detailed work of metal art.

Work in progress: Run, made by chasing and repoussé. Portrait study made from flat brass sheet metal, 0.8mm thick.

Chasing’ is the use of tools to create lines or texture marks on the surface of metal, it can be just like drawing. But the artwork can also be made into a three dimensional form by hitting and stretching the metal surface from behind—‘repoussé’—to sculpt relief, or volume, into the metal surface. The Statue of Liberty is probably the most famous repousséd object in the world (...zero chance of me making anything that big in my studio!).

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

narrative jewellery: tales from the toolbox book launch

For every piece of jewellery I make there is a story. It can be simple, just a note on the “why?” that led to the forms and textures, or the feeling that I want to remember. Sometimes the single idea that could become a piece, conceived way before the act of making, can become so over-whelming that I need to write a whole new reality for the jewellery to exist within. That’s how it was for “Pull”, the first piece of jewellery in a body of work that became the ReFind Collection *. It caused me to look at materials in my home, especially the things that were routinely thrown away, very differently. It was like waking up to realize I just hadn’t been paying the right kind of attention to all the “stuff” in other areas of my life; realizing that maybe jewellery could be linked to something as obscure as industrial-scale food-processing and packaging—if I allowed my mind to receive the information, differently. I am very honoured that my necklace has been included in Mark Fenn’s new ...

will you...?

Artists write stories about their work all the time, and the greatest joy is when that story becomes important to another person.  This project was about creating a piece of fan-art for a client (DP) based on their love of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. DP approached Jeff de Boer because he needed to commission a very special golden snitch sculpture: the body would become an opening engagement ring-box. DP had a very special proposal in mind, and the snitch was to play a key part. Jeff and I do not usually make snitches. Jeff is a renowned metal artist and teacher, famous for creating armour for cats and mice , and collected world-wide. Jeff also has an ever-increasing body of large-scale public art projects (…with lots of news to come in 2016!). His web-site is a magical place, full of stories made real. I am an emerging metal and clay artist whom Jeff is mentoring - particularly in the skills of chasing and repoussé - and these skills were to be at the core of makin...

there's beauty in recycling

Return tree sculpture on show at Centre Court in Market Mall, Calgary, Alberta. October 17 - 23, 2016. Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation's (ABCRC) new sculpture celebrating the beauty of recycling has just been unveiled... Sheri and Angela from ABCRC with a tired but happy Cory and Jeff, and Return - a tree sculpture decorated with materials from pop cans and bottles, milk cartons, juice tins, and every kind of recyclable beverage container that can be returned to depots in Alberta. Recycled containers grow into Alberta flora Jeff de Boer , Cory Barkman , and I were invited to create an artwork that could help reinforce the beauty and value that comes from recycling beverage containers. Our challenge was to re-use containers from the bottle depot as key components of the piece, transforming the materials into something new. Project lead and maker extraordinaire Cory Barkman proposed a tree to capture the vision: " So many Albertan's recy...