Heavy Metal Summer

No, it’s not about music. Metal-Urge is a vast, unprecedented celebration of metal arts taking place throughout the city. If you go, you might never look at a nail the same way again.

Carla Grahn, Helmet | photo by Michael Spafford

For some the phrase “metal arts” conjures up high school shop class disasters. Perhaps an awful copper wall hanging meant to look like a salmon that really looked like a yam.  If you are one of these shop failures, you might want to think about attending Metal-Urge, Tacoma’s citywide celebration of metal transformed into art. From June 6 through September 20, twenty-four Tacoma venues, including Tacoma Art Museum, local galleries, arts organizations and schools will exhibit works by scores of the most creative minds in metal arts.

It’s an exploration of the medium that happened once before, nine years ago, and is now being resurrected. “Nine years ago, Tacoma launched its first Metal-Urge,” says Amy McBride, arts administrator for the City of Tacoma. “Now, to coincide with two major jewelry exhibits at Tacoma Art Museum, we’re thrilled to launch it again.” (The TAM shows are Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, showing June 6 – September 13, and Loud Bones: The Jewelry of Nancy Worden, a retrospective showing June 27 – September 20.)

The works showcased in Metal-Urge represent the wildly diverse styles, subjects and techniques found in contemporary metalworking. Shows at participating venues will exhibit fine art, jewelry, body art and sculpture at various times throughout the summer, along with lectures, workshops and receptions. Some highlights: Nancy Worden at TAM and Traver Gallery, Molly Epstein at Fulcrum, and the remarkable Carla Grahn at Mineral Gallery.

What compels an artist toward the medium of metal? I interviewed two women who will be featured in Metal-Urge to try to get a sense of their process.

For twenty-nine years, Belgian jewelry maker Ilse Verhalle has been handcrafting pieces that exude a quiet elegance in spite of their substantial scale. This Tacoma resident earned her BFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing and has studied under some of the heavies of the metal-arts world (Robert Ebendorf, Jamie Bennett and Tim McCreight, to name a few).

Verhalle chooses to work exclusively in sterling silver, various grades of gold and semiprecious and precious stones. She “hand-forms” the elements of each piece — which means she coaxes the desired shape and texture out of sheet metal with taps of a hammer.

“When I sit down with the materials to create a piece, I let the metal speak to me,” Verhalle says, “I never preplan it.” For Verhalle, preplanning chokes the spontaneity out of the creative process.
The often airy, colorful quality of Verhalle’s creations seems to spring naturally from her buoyant personality. Yet the process is not as natural or effortless as it might seem. The colors and textures of her pieces are a result of “reticulation” — a long, repetitive process of stressing the metal surface with heat as high as 1,200 degrees and letting it cool before dousing it in an acid bath.

Verhalle repeats these steps several times until the metal buckles and collapses on itself. The shape the piece takes after the collapse is, she says, “a complete surprise every time. That’s the fun of it.”

Tacoma metalsmith Amy Reeves, 39, doesn’t have to think long when asked what inspires her creations. “I am inspired by nature,” she says, “by the minimalist, abstract aspects of it.” She is interested in the way natural forms seem random but also repeat themselves. 

Reeves began studying jewelry in the early nineties and graduated with a BFA in Metal Design from the University of Washington in 2003. Since then, her work has shown up in galleries and museums from California to Cleveland as well as in print publications. She uses a variety of techniques to create her pieces, but she favors hand forming and soldering. Her metals of choice are silver, copper and, more recently, steel, and she finds that paper, stone, enamels and found objects fit well into her designs.

“When I create jewelry, I’m always conscious of the human body, of its movement,” Reeves explains. A sterling-silver necklace of irregular hollow circles — one attached to the next in a seemingly random fashion and closed with a solid silver disk — is a study in negative and positive space as it rests on the neck. “That is from a series of pieces I call my River Rock Series, because the shapes remind me of random stones.” Another piece, an elegant, weighty pendant designed to submit to gravity, is a generous cluster of sterling-silver curls. 

“Some of my work is conceptual — that’s the fun stuff,” Reeves says, echoing Verhalle. Reeves’ sterling-silver PEZ dispenser, crowned with an anatomically perfect human head, is evidence of the fun she is having.

Amy McBride describes Metal-Urge as a collaborative effort that’s important not only to the artists and local art scene, but to the city and the region. “The Tacoma Art Museum is an epicenter of the studio art jewelry movement,” says McBride. “Because they are bringing these two jewelry exhibits to town, Metal-Urge provides an opportunity to capitalize on this great Tacoma asset and engage more artists.” And the show will not end at the galleries and museums. On July 31, there will be a Metal-Urge dance party featuring robots. That’s about as metal as you can get.  

For more information on Metal-Urge, go to tacomaculture.org/arts/home.asp.