Award-winning metalworking artist Carson Sio came to campus on Oct. 3 to give an artist talk on his history and process.
“My choice to come to Laramie was largely due to Nash Quinn. I was professionally acquainted with Nash, and when he invited me out for the talk I couldn’t have been happier to oblige. After his disappearance this past summer, I felt I owed it to his memory to carry on with what we had set up, and to stay with the course with the University. I deeply appreciate the University offering me this chance to talk about my work and life as one of the few producing silversmiths in the US these days.”
When asked what inspired him to do metalwork, Sio said, “I first began my journey into metalwork while I was earning my bachelor’s degree at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for Industrial Design. I would take my elective classes in the Craft’s department, and really enjoyed the simple focus of metalsmithing while struggling with more heady and theoretical implications of the design work I was also doing. After college I decided to pursue my metalwork and start building a studio rather than work in an office somewhere…”
His passion for metalworking led to an award winning artistic career. He said that what shaped him as an artist was, “My need to create. Ever since childhood I’ve been making things that interest me; whether wooden swords and crossbows in my dad’s basement workshop or high-end designer furniture at the production shop I worked at throughout my 20’s. My metalwork is an expression of that need to create, to produce, to make something that will hopefully last in this world long after I am gone.”
This need to create has persisted throughout his career. Metalworking is a unique art form in the way that, unlike painting or even sculpting, the process is more comparable to a job like welding than an artistic pursuit in terms of its dangers and execution.
“The process I use to draw a flat sheet of metal up into a vessel of some kind is called “raising”, and it is an incredibly labor intensive and repetitive process. The metal must be “annealed” regularly… to reduce the stress in the metal that comes from work hardening. This process of hammer, heat, repeat is continued until the form has reached the shape I am looking for, sometimes as many as 30+ times,” Sio said. “The dangers of a working silversmith are significant and must be carefully dealt with as a professional artist. Much of my process involves hot metal, whether just annealing to 1200F with a large propane torch or actually melting and casting large amounts of silver at a time. I also work with a variety of chemicals that are certainly not good to ingest, and also produce fumes that must be evacuated to avoid long term damage. There’s also concerns about repetitive stress injuries due to the nature of swinging a hammer for hours at a time.”
Ultimately, Sio said the average amount of time taken on a larger piece of this work is 80 to 100 hours.
