Contemporary Metal student and studio maker, Tony Holly, documented the making of a copper vessel and produced a short video to demonstrate the stages of hand raising.
The work piece begins as a flat disc of metal that is hammered with domed wooden mallets on either a sandbag or recessed timber block to make a shallow bowl form. The vessel is regularly annealed (heated, quenched and cleaned) to soften the metal as it work-hardens from repeated hammering.
The next step is to use specially shaped hammers and anvils to gradually transform the shallow bowl to the desired outline form, in this case a bulged vase. The piece was hammered and annealed several dozen times and took 35 work hours to reach the vase shape.
The final stage was hammering the channels, ridges and texturing of the vessel to achieve the final swirls seen at the end of the video. In all, Tony spent about 40 hours over six weeks to complete the piece.
Tony would like to thank master silversmith Philip Noakes and Robyn Barrow for their kind support that made this work possible.
This piece is a study made solely to develop and explore technique. It was inspired by the works of Hiroshi Suzuki.
