Marsha Trattner is an artist/blacksmith in Brooklyn, and the only person teaching the ancient art of blacksmithing in New York City
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Marsha came across blacksmithing by accident after meeting some artists with a forge behind a squat in the East Village. She was a sculptor and realized metal was her ideal medium. She sees blacksmithing as transformative, for the metal and for the artist. She works out of her studio, called She-Weld, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
“I feel like I can control line and control form and structure in a way that I can’t with other materials,” she says. “I can make it do what I want it to do and it has integrity in a way, for me, that is expressive.”
She does custom projects and sells pieces such as pie pans and bowls on her website. She is also the only person teaching blacksmithing in New York City. She teaches out of her studio and for the School of Visual Arts. Her classes include knife making, creative blacksmithing and metal sculpture. She describes blacksmithing as a break from the digital world that many people in New York City need.
“I get people that have done blacksmithing before or other art or carpentry, and artists that want to incorporate it. And then I get people who sit at a desk all day or sit at the computer all day,” she says. “They just want to do something with their hands. Something physical, something that has some historical context to it, and it’s amazing what happens with that.”
Transcript
You’re taking the metal and when it’s heating up it is changing its molecular structure and there’s something very powerful in that moment that you can change it.
I never set out to become a blacksmith.
I really didn’t know anything about 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 and and kept doing it and kept feeling like there was more and more to learn and more and more things to make and I still feel that way.
I feel like I can control line and control form and structure in a way that I can’t with other materials. Like everything else is just 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, that is expressive.
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, like here you can basically take something that is nothing just a piece of metal, and you can turn it into something and 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.
For more information, contact
Luke Tress
luke.tress1@gmail.com
