Amidst hypnotic scrolling on Etsy (inevitable for most artists), I discover and immediately admire the poetic possibilities of taking boring cutlery and turning it into fun ways to proverbially play with your food (utensils). There I am, swiping through spoons upon forks upon knives with expressions slightly reminiscent of Alice in Wonderlandwhen she finds the bottle commanding “Eat Me/Drink Me,” or of Marie Antoinette’s eloquent boast “Let them eat cake” stamped on a pie server. What fun to take something otherwise practical yet boring and turn it into something whimsical by simply impressing silverware with bits of vernacular…I am quickly quite smitten with the idea of trying this for myself. It wasn’t until winter break that some key tools for this trade came to me on the receiving end of my family’s Secret Santa. Now that I find myself starry-eyed in my dining room-turned-art studio, basking in the realm of possibilities, I realize I am about to embark on an adventure: I have never worked with metal before. Fancy folks make jewelry, and sure, I’ve heard stooooories about working with metal, but I have never tried it. These weird times we are in, while keeping us enclosed, also call for us to crawl out of our shell and try new things. So, I figure, now is the time. Let’s do this. Perhaps this fire within to spring clean and create is all part of being cooped up in my domicile. I’m truly missing my local thrift store being open for treasure hunting, so it’s time to treasure hunt at home. I am embarrassed to say it took a world pandemic for me to clean out my silverware drawer, but lo and behold…I have more than enough flatware to stamp and smash for the sake of art: Disclaimer: I have never done anything with the medium of metal. Usually I sketch with charcoal and chalk or scrapbook special things for my penpals around the globe when I am not cooking something in my kitchen or growing something in my garden. What follows with metal could be a total disaster or downright amazing. We shall see! So here are the tools: After my first hammer and smash with a butter knife on my bench block, I decide there simply must be an easier way to do this whole process: the butter knife is lopsided and sliding all over my bench block, making for a potentially dangerous scenario of knuckle whacking. I’m not deterred as I should be, likely due to sheer excitement, and a knuckle whack does occur. (I have no photo of this: it is an embarrassing moment even though I am all alone. It’s at this point that I decide to watch a quick how-to video. Thank you, Beaducation, for this lovely quick how-to video. Okay, masking tape. Brilliant! My new set up includes masking down the butter knife on my bench block. This is much more stable, and produces significantly better results: Reflecting on my usage of flatware, this is an excellent experiment, and I am happy with the results because they are not perfect, and that makes them special. My disappointment is in the ferocity of my whacking. It clearly isn’t determined enough to produce a deeper stamping and therefore represent my butter love. I conclude that I would like to further experiment with softer and/or thinner metals in the future for stamping. So as to leave my mini-art studio feeling encouraged, I pull out a cute set of measuring spoons that have been successfully stamped by someone (or a machine) that has clearly done this before, and decide to add a signature heart stamp modification to it for fun. The end result: A fun trick I like a lot that I pick up in this process is to color in the stamped letters and symbols with a permanent marker and rub the excess off with a magic eraser or steel wool pad to create a darkness in the lettering that makes visibility much more prominent.
Something that I found to be similar in this artform to all “art” is the beauty of process. We try a thing, and modify another, and potentially change it all up, and have another go at it. Finding out what works and what doesn’t is different for everyone, and that is the art of it all: the process of discovery. And the exciting part: there is so much to discover! Let’s all keep discovering. - Casey Klos, Year of Creativity Program Manager. Find her work on Instagram.
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