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.

Forged Steel and Mosaic Custom Garden Sculpture

If you know us at all, you maaay have noticed combining our skills to create mosaic and steel collaborations is one of our very favorite things to do. Can we tell you just how thrilled we were when this client approached us to create a custom garden sculpture in both forged steel and mosaic?

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We based the design for this sculpture around native Virginia plants such as arrowroot, cat tails, pickerelweed, and ferns. Kyle created an organic design incorporating simple geometric shapes to represent the leaves and flowers. In the first step to bring this sculpture to life, Kyle and his team forged the steel framing and organic forms. Next Johannah made the mosaics to fill in the geometric shapes. The mosaics were made on mesh then transferred into the sculpture, glued in place, and finally grouted.

You can see photos of the sculpture installed in the garden below, as well as a few close-up details of the mosaics and forged organic forms.

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