Marsha Trattner is a sculptor and an artist. She’s also a blacksmith— the only one to teach this ancient art in New York City.
The rest of the story
Marsha Trattner was a sculptor. She then discovered blacksmithing and came to the realization that forging metal was the type art for her. For Marsha, being a blacksmith is all about change: change in the structure of the metal and a change for her as an artist, each and every time.
“When you’re actually working at the forge and it’s, you’re taking the metal and when it’s heating up it’s changing its molecular structure. And there’s something very powerful in that moment that you can change it,” she says.
Currently Marsha has her own studio: She-Weld in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She is also the only person teaching the art of blacksmithing currently in New York City.
In her studio, Marsha does custom projects and sells them on her website. Her classes include knife making, creative blacksmithing and metal sculpture. For Marsha, blacksmithing is a very needed break from the digital world that many people need.
“Here you can basically take something that is nothing, just a piece of metal, and you can turn it into something, you can do it in a very short amount of time; you can transform it and so, I think there’s just a lot of satisfaction in that, in still having some physicality and learning something creative and learning something that really has that history behind it,” Marsha says.
Transcript
So, I’m a sculptor. I never set out to become a blacksmith; I just thought I could learn a few things. I didn’t really have any idea that I would like it. I didn’t have any specific thing I wanted to get out of it, but I just really found something simpatico with it and just kept doing it and doing it and kept feeling like there was more and more things to learn and more and more things to make. And I still feel that way. When you’re actually working at the forge and it’s, you’re taking the metal and when it’s heating up it’s changing its molecular structure. And there’s something very powerful in that moment that you can change it. I feel like I can control line and control form and structure in a way that I can’t with other materials, so it seems like everything else is too rigid or too goopy. Like this I can make it do what I want it to do and it has integrity in a way that, for me, is expressive. A blacksmith that I worked under for while, he said, “you know you do it because you love it.” “You have to have this kind of commitment and joy in it and it’s really hard work.” And at some point everybody reaches a physical limitation with it -you know you find ways of either adapting your work or adapting your tools for it- and there’s a lot you can do if you think things through, just using leverage or using tools in a way that is smart, so the people that have been around the block a bit know that there’s really no reason that a woman couldn’t do it versus a man. I can make tables; I can make anything that people need. Everybody’s dealing so much with the digital world or working spending hours a day with things that aren’t tactile or aren’t physical. Here you can basically take something that is nothing, just a piece of metal, and you can turn it into something, you can do it in a very short amount of time; you can transform it and so, I think there’s just a lot of satisfaction in that, in still having some physicality and learning something creative and learning something that really has that history behind it.
For more information, contact Mack.Burke@journalism.cuny.edu
