Metal magic happens

Over the last few days much of our time has been taken up with events surrounding Fiona and Susan's gorgeous exhibition in the Noosa Regional Gallery. This has included having some good friends of ours - visiting and celebrating the art and life.

However, if one is visiting the home of artists one can expect to be offered or dragged into spending some time creating. Yesterday afternoon Fiona and Susan were involved all afternoon running a collaborative artists book making workshop in Noosa Regional Gallery. So I invited three friends to do assemblage and metal work stuff for the afternoon. I found that I had three people who just wanted to do as much as they could in one afternoon. As you can see from the photo below they achieved magical things.

©2015 Barry Smith - The metal magic with a bookmark each by Fiona - peace doves were also made but not photographed

There was a lot of hammering, heating, beating, cutting, sawing, grinding and polishing right up to last light.

Polishing and grinding as sun sets - squeezing every bit out of the afternoon

Some photos of work tools and the 'artists' at work.

Forming leaves

Planishing a bowl

Making posts for a small sculpture trilogy

Annealing leaf forms

Opening leaf forms

Painting his leaves with patina solution

And some more photos of their creations.

©2015 Barry Smith - B's trio of copper leaves 

©2015 Barry Smith - M's trio of copper leaves

©2015 Fiona Dempster - M's small sculptures

©2015 Barry Smith - Another view of M's sculptures

©2015 Barry Smith - Bases for the bowls

©2015 Barry Smith - D's trio of bowls

©2015 Barry Smith - B and M's bowls

We were pushing the limits with the patina solution - ended up having to dry it with a heat gun so we could put a coat of varnish over the patina and grind the sharp edges off. I think we were all amazed what was achieved - good example of working with motivated people - I demonstrated as they went through the stages but they did all the work themselves.