Forged Steel Botanicals

From his earliest days as a blacksmith, Kyle has enjoyed forging flowers, leaves, and other botanical structures. It’s a unique and satisfying challenge to transform hard, flat steel into the fluid shapes of plants. Here are a couple recent projects that put those skills to use.

First up is a small tabletop bamboo sculpture. This piece stands about 12” tall and was included in our exhibit as guest artists of the month at Crozet Artisan Depot a few years ago.

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Next is a set of shelf brackets designed around a grapevine and leaf motif. A winery near Vancouver, British Columbia reached out to us about creating these custom brackets for their new tasting room.

You can see other examples of Kyle’s botanical forging in other blog posts, including a double-leaf tree gate, a custom mantle mirror, and an exterior cat tail sculpture.

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Forged Bronze Cross with Lilies

Some our readers may remember Kyle and his team created a double-leaf tree gate for a local church a few years ago. They reached out to us again when they were ready for the next phase of their courtyard redesign. This part of the project included the creation of a decorative bronze cross.

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Forging the lilies was the most intricate part of this project. In the last photo above, you can see some of the process. Kyle starts with a billet of bronze, then forges that out into a sheet. From there he forges the flower itself.

Below you can see photos of the finished cross and lilies. The first two photos are at our old studios in Richmond. The last one shows the piece installed in the church’s courtyard garden.

"Forest Flora" custom mosaic series

Do you remember, early in the pandemic, when the government sent checks to help us hold out through those strange and frightening times? And do you remember the discussion that it was up to us to support the small businesses we valued, like book stores and hair stylists, to make sure they lasted?

This series is an example of one couple deciding artists were the ones they wanted to support with that check they received. Their regular income continued uninterrupted and they viewed that check as a bonus. By using those funds to purchase work from artists (aka small business owners) they could both enjoy that art in their home for years to come, as well as help ensure those businesses carried on into the future.

As the recipient of a commission from this couple, this work was welcome income during those fraught days. It was also meaningful to us, as artists and as a company, to know we were valued in that way. And in the days when we were restricted to our own homes and yards, it provided an opportunity to find respite in the great outdoors we so love from the safety of a computer.

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The patrons of this set are natives of the eastern United States. In moving to the Midwest, they had discovered an appreciation for the prairie environment. But they had also found they were missing the forests of their childhoods and early years as a couple. The goal of this series was to create a tactile and visual reminder of those woods.

The first piece in the series, “Into the Forest,” is the largest. Johannah wanted to convey both the cool darkness at the forest floor as well as the bright green chaos and light looking up through the tops of a trees. This piece is created in Mexican and gold smalti in a raw maple frame.

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The next three pieces are progressively smaller. With these pieces, we wanted to represent native plants and fungi found on the forest floor, specifically a mushroom, a flower, and a fern. Johannah and the clients chose the bright orange Cantharellus cinnabarinus mushroom, red and yellow Eastern Columbine flowers, and Ebony spleenwort for the fern. These pieces were created from hand-cut stained glass set in tinted black mortar, in a style inspired by a previous series depicting endangered flowers.