Featured Artist Monica Coyne

Artist and blacksmith Monica Coyne forges abstracted human forms out of steel, creating figures that appear to emerge from the metal. Visit her website to learn more.

 

 

I was raised in San Francisco. When I was little, I did not dream of becoming a blacksmith. The closest I got to an anvil was watching Wile E. Coyote get one dropped on his head. I moved out of the city to go to Humboldt State University in rural northern California where I studied Industrial Arts. My emphasis was woodworking.

 

 

In 2004 I took a job in a fabrication shop as a welder; it was there that I had my first experience with blacksmithing. Forging is the act of heating a piece of steel to 2000 degrees, just below melting temperature, and shaping it with a hammer.

 

 

I was immediately captivated by the ability to form the hot steel with cold steel tools that I often made myself. In 2008 I opened my shop. My house and shop are three miles back on a dirt road and off the grid in Ettersburg, California.

 

 

I am trained as a professional blacksmith. My technique is traditional but my goal is to contradict the nature of the medium. Steel is heavy and hard. I use the strength of the material to create forms that look and feel light and soft.

 

 

Woodworking has influenced the design and execution of forged joinery in my work. I make pieces that balance, move and can come apart. Fascination with the way the metal swells and drags under the pressure of the tool has led me to make human figures.

 

 

Most metal figure work is cast. The metal is poured into a mold. Forging steel is much different. The material is moved like clay. Because it is yellow hot, it has to be moved with tooling that acts as extensions of my hands. This process creates a look that is unique in every piece. I often combine the disciplined conduct of the joinery with the emotional figure work.

 

 

Our ancestors have been here for about six million years. We have been forging iron for more than 3500 years. I am thrilled by our ingenuity. It is amazing that we can send an item 300 million miles into space and land it on Mars. But it is also disheartening to know that humans have caused the extinction of thousands of organisms. Our legacy is largely terrible. It confounds me that these things come from the same human mind.

 

 

We are controlled by our perceptions. Innovation and depredation have propelled us forward as a species, but our greatest strength is the ability to talk each other into things. Humans have an amazing ability to morph and control the way we see things.

 

 

My work is an experiment in altering my own perception of what a bar of steel represents.

 

 

Can I push this metal around in such a way that when I look at it I see a human figure? How much change do I have to make to the material before I start to believe? How little actual change can I make in the bar and still change my perception?

 

Artist Monica Coyne invites you to follow her on Instagram and Pinterest.

 

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