Forging

Last year, one of my teachers adviced me to try forging. It was a technique I had never tried before, and it kind of infuses respect, as you are working with fire and iron, in Fine Arts there's not so many people that tries forging to make a piece.

This is the first piece I made improvising, as my teacher's advice was to buy iron and start practicing with it, to see how it works and learn about different techniques. Therefore I started to give different shapes to the iron rods I got, and found particulary interesting trying to reach the iron's limit of bending

Each day, I'd start working with a straight iron rod of 1 meter, and bend it as many times as posible, making it compacted as posible. As a result I started to pile up pieces of bent iron as big as a hand, and the idea of forming a shape from all of them eventually came to my head. Each iron rod had a different shape, as I was never able to decide it's final shape, It came by itself with the bending

Finally, I got 20 pieces and welded them toghether in several semicircles, and then, I welded them together, and rusted them with some chemical products and fire

It doesn't have a lot of concept, but it was a great way of trying another way of working, feeling how the piece grows by itself with time and effort, without any plan, leaving everything to improvisation. Also, I learnt a lot of forging, from starting a fire, controlling the heat it produces, where is the heat located or where are the iron limits before it breaks