THE CRAFT OF FIRE

I was doing laundry the other day and needed to wait for the cycle to end, so I thought I’d do some finishing work on these salamanders. I had brought these pieces in to the basement to be worked on because it’s too cold in the garage. I didn’t have much experience with these files, so I started filing away to see how they would work. The salamander pieces have little pockmarks in them so, working on a spot underneath that isn’t readily visible, I thought I’d see if I could smooth them away. I didn’t have much faith that I would achieve anything; I approached the work more as curiosity, to see what would happen.  I was doing laundry so I might as well... So there I was, filing away, the laundry machine chugging away, metal powder accumulating slowly on the table. The filing goes slowly; rubbing and rubbing this way and that, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  I wondered, should I take a picture, to document this activity? Nah, it’s so inconsequential. Tiny little...

These are some of the crucibles I used during our work with aluminum. They are cans, tomato cans, I believe. One of them is wrapped in ceramic fibre.  I went to throw them out the other day because I'll need new crucibles for bronze and these won't work, but to my surprise, I found it was hard to do. So strange. As I picked them up, I thought they looked rather beautiful in their grey-black way, and I felt a kind of affection for them. My trusty crucibles! They held up, they did the job, they were reliable, convenient, good companions doing their part... Companions?   There I was, feeling a kind of affection for a few, charred tin cans.  And I thought, "What a strange thing - to feel affection for things ." Now of course, we feel attached to objects all the time, it's not at all a rare phenomenon. Quite the opposite! We love certain items of clothing, our phones, our bikes, a pair of shoes, a favourite spoon or mug, and so on. And so on. And so on. We get very att...