"Grave Goods"

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TWO SMITHS Sandra Dunn & Steve White "Sheep Cauldron" hammered copper and forged stainless steel The idea for this piece arrived while I was researching the history of blacksmithing. In his book, Science for the Citizen, Lancelot Hogben describes how when humans began to practice animal husbandry, in particular sheep, they started to pay close attention to the cyclical motion of the patterns of stars and the moon and thus formulated calendars. Because sheep give birth in the spring it became necessary to predict when this would happen. The first iron that was forged was meteoric iron —basically fallen stars. So at the edges of my mind this idea of baptismal font for the birthing of blacksmithing came about. An event inspired by sheep and stargazing: the rams horns which spiral around as they grow symbolizing the spinning universe and referencing the vegetable forms that ironwork seems to inevitably take on as though infused with the spirit of the fuel (compressed biomass) that heats it in the forge. Everything we make, in a sense, comes from the ground — the ore, the fuel — it’s all goods from the grave.
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