The artists take two paths to create that disjunction between material and associative imagery. The first is to play with forms that one might call traditional, or inherent, in ironworking, but to turn them to uses other than those for which they were originally imagined. But their scale and handworked delicacy turns them into precious objects, adornments fit more for a jewelry box than the heat and soot and necessary utility of the forge. Pepos manipulates the heritage of blacksmithing, turns it back on itself, to transcend its limitations. But a more typical approach of the artists in the exhibition is to create images, rich in association, that explode the traditional forms of ironwork and its origins as a means to produce utilitarian objects.
Several artists makes sculptures that only happen to be made of forged metal.
Robert Hansen's Going Back suggests the delicately balanced stainless steel astrolabe of a sundial, its geometric forms whirling through space. These works are surprising, using their materials to their advantage by stretching preconceptions. The best works take the idea even further. Tom Joyce's Wall Piece is a minimalist sculpture. Four dinner plate-sized squares of iron, arranged in a grid, block out the corners of a fifth square of another, richer finish in an homage to geometric abstraction humanized by the intensely handworked quality that iron demands.