Enameled metal vessels by Melissa Manley (copyright Melissa Manley)
Artist’s Statement: I grew up along a shoreline. My first memory of the edge of the sea was in kindergarten on a field trip. The train took us from San Diego to Del Mar to the famous tidepools. I was enthralled. I have felt the shore’s pull ever since. I’ve spent most of my life on the North Carolina coast watching tides move inlets, the marsh grass change color, the terns wheel and dive and watching the surf fill the spaces left by my toes. I push the metal like wind pushes the dunes, like water swirling past a paddlestroke. The vortex is my muse.
Medium: Raised and enameled metal vessels. I like hammering the metal as if it were more pliable clay. I love the ring of the hammer on the metal form and enjoy watching the heat rise off the rim as it comes out of the kiln. I love watching the slow metamorphosis of the color materializing as it slowly cools. It’s like breathing life into the bowl. I can’t get enough.
These pieces are “raised”. Many people don’t know what that is. It is the old way silversmiths make teapots, or any other vessel for that matter. The bowl starts from a flat disc and is hammered onto forms by hand. It is time consuming and takes many, many hours. My pieces are then sculpted by filling them with pitch and then hammering with chasing hammers and repousse’ tools. After I sculpt them, I often enamel them in a kiln with glass powders. View this process.
The silver chalice I submitted rests in an electroformed copper stand. The grasses surrounding my teal bowl are also electroformed. To make the stand, the rods were shaped and then put in an acid bath and connected to a rectifier that produces an electrical current. That current causes copper molecules to move from a thick copper bar and grow themselves onto my copper stand. This process can make rough textural detail on the surface. I felt it lent itself to the idea of organic corals or grasses on the shore, and echoed the action of acretion that occurs on metal objects in the sea.
Artistic Resume:
- Currently teaching metals at Cape Fear Community College
- MFA East Carolina University, 2006
- Society of North American Goldsmiths since 2003
- BA, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, 1987
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