If he had a hammer: Artist Tom Joyce

Joyce was born in Oklahoma and moved in 1974 to El Rito, where he trained in blacksmithing. “I’ve made art as long as I’ve been a blacksmith,” he said. “My career as an artist has run a parallel path alongside my training as a blacksmith. All along, I’ve veered toward making work that tends to catapult me away from any sense of complacency, to move out into the world where a subtle anxiety of the unknown is the comfort zone I seek.” He established his Santa Fe studio in 1977 and also maintains a studio in Brussels, Belgium. He has exhibited internationally since 1981 and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2003. Examples of Joyce’s work reside in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

The artist is known for coaxing a handmade quality out of his dense works in forged and cast iron, and for working with the byproducts of large-scale manufacturing — in fact, when he harvests iron during a factory operation, he speaks of it as the “offspring” of the “parent” material and use. “The primary reason I use this material is its historical relevance. It’s seeking out specific material that has had a former life that somehow can be addressed in the new work. That’s why it’s critical to be present at the factory, because I’m watching objects being forged for the very first time. They’re testing the limits of how to arrive at a certain complex shape using a forged methodology that you would never imagine could be made that way. I know that that object is employed inside a defense or space application or whatever and the part I’ve retrieved is still tied metaphorically to that parent.”

The seven sculptures of his 2014 Two to One installation at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City pose an interesting contrast in terms of the relationship with their “parents.” Joyce and the director of the museum on busy Columbus Circle decided it would be nice to provide a place for people to pause, to slow down. “I knew the sculptures wanted to be fairly short and that they’d be inviting to sit on. But when you’re sitting there, in a relative calm in the midst of all that activity, each one of those objects was actually made from something that comes from a machine that is extremely noisy or dangerous or violent. It’s paused in this moment, but its parent is something that is quite dramatic.” The pieces, he said, “are descendants of parts forged for excavating equipment that move mountains, ore-crushing machines that chew up rocks the size of SUVs, and paper-mill shafts that spin around the clock at deafening velocities.”

Iron and steel are this artist’s usual materials of choice, but Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand also includes 3-D-printed translucent materials, video, and photography. His psychedelically colorful Well series of 40- by 40-inch prints are based on photographs he took of the ends of 40,000-pound ingots at the forge. The show has a total of 34 works, including forged and cast-iron sculptures that range from the 14-inch Divided III to the nine-foot-tall Stack VI; lithographs and charred drawings; Tenet, a hanging mixed-media installation of tools and artifacts involved in the forging process; a video titled Core Value; and Untitled, a 3-Dtools installation. 

Untitled is an artistic reflection of a sampling of the hundreds of steel tools hanging on the walls of Joyce’s shop. “We scanned a lot of these tools that were made for specific jobs, tools I will never need again,” he said in early July. “We’re 3-D-printing models of them on translucent material and I’ll use pigments and we’ll create a dark room and the tools will be illuminated as if they’re X-rays. There will be about 250 of them.”

The exhibit is wide-ranging, but for the most part it’s a continuation of the work Joyce does with two factories: the Kohler factory in Wisconsin for his cast-iron pieces and a forging facility in Spring Grove, Illinois, that he’s had access to for nearly 15 years. “It’s really a gift that they allow me to come in. They don’t work with any other artists; it’s an industrial forge and the processes they’re using are really cutting-edge.” Joyce keeps up on the industry via contacts with metallurgists and materials specialists, but he’s often looking for different things than the factories are. “I think about how to take what is problematic in industry, the kinds of things that happen to steel that are still a natural part of their process but are ones that they try to avoid, and then to exploit them in different ways to find some inherent nature of the material.”

Joyce said the industry works with more than 700 alloys, but iron itself has “enough peculiar qualities” to keep him busy and fascinated, especially discovering new features of its molecular structure that can be exposed through the work. “In the casting, because in the molten state iron moves as freely as water, it’s how to use that very liquid state to realize forms that are more complex than I could ever forge. And in the forging realm, it’s to try to find inherent patterns inside the material itself and express them in different ways. When you see my work, you know that something else has happened. It’s not the kind of material that you would expect to perform the way that it is, and that’s only happening because I’ve taken it to these extreme states and caused it to do things that it shouldn’t do in industry but are pretty expressive.”

An obvious example in Everything at Hand is the deeply crackled Aureole. “We heat it up to 2,500 degrees and then quench it in a solution that allows it to suddenly compress and every time it expands and contracts, it shows more of the grain.” Another is Fissure, a stainless-steel piece that was originally five feet in diameter. “It was a big bar that was cogged down, squared up, and forged fast and cold so that it started to delaminate, and once that begins it can’t stop, so the cracks will migrate and express the grain structure.” The show has six reddish Surge pieces, high-carbon steel and related to a part used in agricultural food processing. Bloom, a similarly richly rusty work, is named for a term in smelting, the process of heating ore to extract iron. “Bloom is the first phase in smelting, when ore is melted in the furnace until it becomes a spongelike mass, and that mass is forged into bars for use.” Six Two to One pieces are installed outside the CCA building, a symbolic echo of the Columbus Circle grouping.

Three Aureole pieces, installed both inside the Tank Garage and in the new CCA sculpture garden, are more than 6 feet high and weigh up to 6,050 pounds. The whimsically wrinkled Berg XV sculpture is 16,800 pounds of forged high-carbon steel that appears to have just floated down to rest for a moment. And the looming, forged stainless-steel Stack VI weighs 42,500 pounds. Joyce achieves some remarkably un-ironlike textures in these works. For instance, the top of Fissure looks like swelled and cracked dough, Stack and Berg could easily be slumpy and soft, and Surge has sensuous folds like human skin.

During our visit on a recent July afternoon, Joyce spent some time hand-spraying Thicket II’s 23 hammer-head clusters and two Surge pieces, part of a patina-nurturing process that involves dozens of moistenings. Then he walked down to an area where associates were performing meticulous cleanup work on Bloom, Aureole, and other forms. “Usually I give myself a year or two to put together a major exhibition like this, so we’ve just been kind of wacky, running around and doing things all over the place,” he said. “This will be the largest grouping of objects ever put together in any exhibition I’ve had. We will be bringing over 200,000 pounds of steel. It won’t seem that it’s big, but it is heavy.”      

Reception and walk-through no charge; thereafter $5 suggested donation; visit www.ccasantafe.org or call 505-982-1338  for information about related events