Metalsmith Magazine. Vol 45 No 2

Each morning, I perform a fairly standard ritual: I sit in an armchair with a cup of coffee and write down what I recall from my dreams. After time spent quietly reflecting, I reach for my phone and perform a different sort of ritual, one that shortens the distance between the world and where I sit. As I scroll through social media, the contrast between images of global events and product advertisements causes a kind of mental whiplash: aerial views of an entire city bombed to rubble, a greenwashed ad campaign for an organic cotton clothing brand, bystander videos of masked agents abducting people from their homes, a magical anti-wrinkle cream paraded as self-care.

This ritual even has a name: “doomscrolling.” The algorithmic waltz between witnessing devastation and palliative consumption continues in endless juxtapositions that offer manufactured goods as a balm against manufactured helplessness and despair. This issue arrives in a moment when, as Sebastian Grant aptly notes, “the West is descending into authoritarianism,” and “feelings of chaos and uncertainty have caused many to turn away from materialism in search of more meditative and esoteric ways of living.”

Simultaneously embracing ancestral heritages and rejecting colonialist religions, the artists in Grant’s feature engage with intangible qualities of spirit. This issue contains a variety of pathways through which to approach the ineffable: Jay Martin finds God at the kitchen sink, and Sasha Newkirk witnesses the magic of communality at Burning Man. In the Studio subject Corrinne Eira Evans draws inspiration from the layered mythologies of the British moors, and the artist-couples profiled in View engage with geological timescales through carving and casting with tufa, a material that can be tens of thousands of years old.

The impulse to contain or materialize the intangible is alive in Samantha De Tillio’s piece on opulent reliquary traditions, and in Ask Me Anything, where Aya Iwata shares the personal connection between her ethereal enamel work and familial loss. Meanwhile Narong Tintamusik offers “relic-like” necklaces that preserve Thai culture in an imagined dystopic future of ecological collapse. LOOK features Colombian artists whose works transmute something outside the limits of language—as Ana María Jiménez’s writes, “I wouldn’t know how to name it”—but are rooted in the agency of both author and material. An eloquent offering by steven KP considers the depth and intentionality of Lori Talcott’s practice, which is laden with material metaphor and intimate rituals.

The artworks and the stories in this issue demonstrate the power and agency of our practices—we are a community that is adept at making meaning and use out of materials which are stubborn, hostile, or amorphous and that to others seem unmovable or impenetrable. What is unfolding now is happening to all of us with varying degrees of proximity, not merely parading across our screens. As the scale and intensity of it is amplified, let us remember our power and its uses.

/ Adriane Dalton, Editor.


Features:
- Ritual Magic and Connection: The Jewelry of Burning Man by Sasha Newkirk.
- Continuum of Indigenous Expression: Casting Call by RoseMary Diaz.
- The Reliquary as Postmortem Adornment by Samantha De Tillio.

Departments:

• Foreword
• Contributors
• Voice & Vision by Jay Martin
• Findings by Sasha Newkirk
• View by RoseMary Diaz
• Fresh off the Bench by Narong Tintamusik
• Ask Me Anything by Aya Iwata
• In the studio by Mazzi Odu
• Look by Ana María Jiménez
• Jewelry Thinking by Samantha De Tillio
• In Memoriam by Jennifer Altmann
• Event Calendar

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