My name is Stuart Makin, and I’m a blacksmith.
Blacksmithing is the process of getting steel or iron hot, and hammering it with a hammer over an anvil until you get the shapes that you want.
It’s quite an old practice, dating back a few thousand years.
We use it today, combined with modern techniques as well, to reproduce
things from history but also to create new pieces of art and design.
There’s a large range of items within the Staffordshire Hoard, some of which haven’t
even been identified and just identified as ‘item of gold’.
A lot of items are sword fittings – sword pommels and cross guards. There are some – more
unusually – seax hilts. Seax is an Anglo-Saxon knife, it’s the Old English word for knife.
The central motif for the sculpture is heavily inspired by one of the seax handles, the knife handles.
It’s a round element of gold with garnets fitted to it, and it would have made
the upper part of a knife handle. So you unfold this out, and it was a pair of dragons,
one above the other. Now I wanted my sculpture to draw from the
decorative elements of the Staffordshire Hoard, but also to try to convey how a piece would
have been made. So cloisonné, which is the process of setting stones into cells –
you form tiny little shapes, squares, circles and you set a stone or piece of enamel into it –
I wanted to try and show that through the progression of the sculpture.
So, at the bottom you have the outline chased into the steel, and as you move up you have
these cells that are cut out – that open section. And as you move through to the top,
it’s completed: you have the red, set against the gold, and it just shows a pathway from
beginning to completion of how they would have done this originally.
During my original creative process, I surrounded myself with pictures of items from the Staffordshire Hoard.
By immersing yourself in it all the time you begin to focus on the ones that you
like best, and you go through those ten favourite pictures and you decide: what is it? What
is it about this picture that I love so much? And once I discovered those elements, I then
tried to piece them together into something that would convey my feeling of the Staffordshire Hoard.
I pick the design from a knife handle, but
I pick the eagle from a sword mount, and then I do sketches, I do full-size drawings,
model making, and eventually you begin to piece together these jigsaw pieces until you
stand back one day and you look at it and go: “that’s great, that’s it, that’s
what I need to make now. In full size, in metal.”
The sculpture is quite large-scale: it’s two and a half metres tall by two metres wide.
It’s made of steel, and this has been coated with a high-pigment gold paint, to try and
replicate that gold from the items in the Staffordshire Hoard. And the red elements
are a red perspex, so you get that really interesting and striking colour contrast –
I always wanted to maintain that. But, being a blacksmith, my primary medium
of work is through steel or iron, so that’s what I know how to work, so that’s what
we went with. And, also, it’s got a strength to it that’s appropriate for an item this
large – a visual strength as well. So you’ve got these four rearing eagles holding this
central, almost like totem-pole-type motif in the centre, but also a physical strength
because something that tall needs to be able to support its own weight.
I use a variety of tools, from electric to mechanical and manual tools. So we have hammers,
anvils, we’ve got the forge – the old-fashioned way of forming metal by getting it hot and
hammering it. I’m doing a lot of cutting with grinders and dremels, but then the tidying
is quite often done with hand files and chisels and things like that.
I’ll be using taps and dies to construct things. I want to use as little electric welding
as possible because it has a very obvious visual impact. I want to use hidden joints,
so you get these nice smooth lines on the sculpture – nothing interfering and breaking
those lines up when it’s fully constructed. I really, really hope that this piece is going
to communicate the scale, the magnitude of importance of the Staffordshire Hoard: what
it tells us about the skills of these Anglo-Saxon craftsmen, their culture, their wealth,
how they treat things in an almost ritual manner. The deliberate destruction of a lot of these
items sort of implies that they were ritually killing the sword, taking away the sword’s
own personality. The theory is that that sword has been imbued by that person who owned it,
so it itself has to be killed to remove that power.
Throughout my training and my early years as a smith, I worked for other people, making
things they told me to make. I never had any creative input in what was being done. When
I design things now, when I make things now, the passion behind it is mine, the driving
force is mine – I’m not doing it just because I’m being paid.
I love it because I see something through from design, through making, through completion.
I get pleasure from every stage of that, and I can stand back – after all the sweat and
the blood and the tears – and I can look at something that’s finished and go:
"I did that, with my hands. Like, just normal human being hands. I did that. I took tools,
I took metal in its bare form; I bent it, I shaped it, and now it’s done.” And you
get this sense of real achievement when you create something with your own hands. I just
think it’s fantastic, you know, being able to make something from effectively nothing.