Playing with Fire
7/18/25
“By hammer and hand all craft doth stand,” says blacksmith Heather McLarty, paraphrasing “The Blacksmith’s Song” written by Moses Kipling in 1828. We’re standing inside her tipi in the sprawling Highland Park creative complex she shares with her husband, Troy Evans, an inspired and multi-skilled artist who incidentally made the tipi.
The Sioux-style tripod tipi (Evans is from northwest Montana) is sewn from 100 percent cotton—McLarty says they tried a cotton-hemp blend earlier, without success—and larger-than-life-size otters painted by a friend gambol across a few of the exterior panels.
The tipi, she says, offers her tools some protection from the elements. Many of the tools were made from iron by McLarty herself, and wear a coat of deep orange rust, ferrous turmeric.
“No jeweler would touch these tools,” she says, “but rust is inevitable, and it doesn’t stop me from working.”
McLarty will serve as the guest curatorial consultant for the upcoming exhibition “Tools of the Trades,” coming to Craft in America in September. Participating artists include Seth Gould, Tom Latané, Michael Sherrill, Liza Nechamkin, Dennis Dusek, Brien Biedler, and Andrea Harvin Kenington of NC Black ( a boutique tool company).
The announcement for the exhibition states, “Prior to today’s mass production, makers and artists fabricated their own implements as needed. In doing so, they might decide to add a bit of beauty to the functional with some decoration. Tools of the Trades celebrates the ingenuity born of necessity and the special narratives in the hand-crafted. The objects pertain to a wide scope of crafts: ceramics, textiles, hot glass, woodworking and metal, including the niche fields within them, such as ironwork or spinning.”
McLarty explains that working inside a space without walls “took some getting used to,” but the tipi’s flexible design, especially smoke flaps which can be easily raised or lowered to accommodate large pieces of steel, is in fact ideal for her process. This is especially helpful since she loves sheet-work, saying, “You can make anything with a sheet of steel, using it to create visual mass without actual mass.” One technique she uses to accomplish this is repoussé, meaning to push up from the reverse side. She’ll use a form shaped from pitch, a pliable mixture of pine resin, plaster, clay dust and some type of oil or fat, as the sculpting model around which the heated metal is shaped.
If all of this sounds medieval, or even more ancient, that’s because it is.
Blacksmiths, she says, are among the few craftspeople who not only make their own tools but also make tools for many other artisans. Smithing is traditionally associated with iron, but McLarty is deeply into steel, which is an iron-carbon alloy– preferably 18 gauge. She teaches workshops where copper—soft, forgiving, comparatively inexpensive—is used as an introductory medium, and she also works with bronze.
Among her specialties are railings and gates, which often integrate found objects. The gate to her home incorporates billiard balls as the street address numbers, and other gates, such as a 15-foot by 15-foot steel and copper entryway to the Occidental College Athletic Field, are even more fanciful.
To plan a railing, she makes what she calls a “story stick,” which is a length of pine used as a model, marked with the stairs and other aspects of the build. She says, “I’m not a linear person, and I don’t think in two dimensions. I may do a basic sketch, but really, to get started on a metal piece, I pretty much pick up a tool and start working.”
For the past century, sociologists have theorized that much modern angst arises from the fact that urban people rarely make things with their hands, with even manual laborers, such as assembly-line workers, producing only an isolated element with no sense of completion. Women have historically excelled in art forms and craft forms termed low resistance: cooking, baking, sewing, painting, embroidering, knitting, weaving, crocheting, quilling, clay sculpting, beadwork, jewelry fabrication. Whipping 18-gauge steel into submission requires an entirely different attitude.
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