Steel Roses In Your Beds

Maegan Crowley, blacksmith, hardly ever uses new material for her steel garden sculptures. She finds discarded metal objects at the local metal dump. Friends offer their finds too, riveted slabs of rusty bridges and gnarled thick wire.

”I like to use stuff that was something else so I can change it into something totally different. Kind of gives it a new life. When I go to the scrap yard, it's my playground.”

As artist-in-residence at Peters Valley Craft Center in Layton, New Jersey, Crowley heads the blacksmith shop. She teaches and co-ordinates the summer programs, maintains shops and fixes machines. She has a private studio, where she welds and hammers her dreams.

Crowley studied classical music in college, but switched to silversmithing when making a tool one day in class. “ heated a piece of steel with a torch, hit it and I said ‘this is what I want to do.’” At Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan she acquired an eye for detail, copying every structure of dogwood and roses.

Now she works in themes and drifts of ideas, welding fluid forms of metal that almost breathe like the flowers and plants she sculpts from. Graceful doorknockers with tree buds stem from botany. She likes to take the hard look of steel away from the metal and make it look soft and organic, and groupings of boxes, bowls and candlesticks often appear to be in movement.

“I'm interested in gesture and form. Sometimes the pieces lean together and I like to think of them as a little family.”

As with all her work, Crowley's garden ornaments are one of a kind. Garden lighting is big. Works in progress include two 8-foot tall sculptures with metal posts and light fixtures. They are large­ filigreed on a grand scale to cast a kaleidoscope of shadow.

“I get my inspiration from natural forms that really do exist. When I blow it up and change the scale, that's when the sci–fi stuff starts to happen.” Crowley accepts custom commissions for almost any decorative steelwork. She wants people to know that the tools and technique are the same as iron, but now we have steel.

“I love welding and torch cutting. I could do it all day long. It's fun. I just kind of get into the zone and keep going with it.”

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published June 01, 2003