ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rachel David is an artist blacksmith. She grew up in Maryland and graduated from the Evergreen State College in 2004 with a focus on metal sculpture. At the Penland School of Craft she studied with Maegan Crowley and E.A.Chase, and assisted Jeffrey Funk. In the fall of 2006, Rachel taught classes at The Steel Yard in Providence Rhode Island and was a visiting artist at the Appalachian center for Craft in Tennessee. Rachel now works in her New Orleans’ studio in the 9th Ward sweating and dreaming.

IN HER OWN WORDS

I started working in metal about 6 years ago. I poured myself into the art of blacksmithing and its techniques. Blacksmithing is one of those romantic lost arts that allowed the world to advance and is being revived by a growing number of dedicated artists. Forging is the process of heating metal until it glows yellow, becoming pliable enough for the creator to manipulate it to the desired shape. Forging is a very direct method of creation; there is a long, arduous and loving process involved in transforming the raw material into its final embodiment.

I am inspired by people’s emotional and physical gestures and how these gestures are mimicked in natural forms. As I create, I work with a few forms, repeating them over and over in different combinations to develop a vocabulary in order to share my ideas visually. This body of work shows where I think people are coming from and going to and how they affect their surroundings.

There are three series represented here, the first was inspired by the post-Katrina New Orleans made in January and February of 2006. Next, the “Eat the Bomb” series follows up by addressing the self destructive tendencies I see happening individually and socially as our intentions to bite off more than we can chew. The third series is of my own mutated eco-system; the evacuations of my mind from my everyday life. I think we are dooming ourselves through hatred, violence and environmental destruction. I refer to the bomb in its non-slang terms of a man-made socially harmful, self destructive and environmentally caustic creation. All of these pieces refer to the bomb either as a cause, action, or effect of the bomb; us. The works show our mutating selves and eco-system in plant and sea creature like forms wanton for destruction.

The first two series focus on people and their interactions and collaborations with the greater society. We, as individuals, live beyond our means, working endlessly and frantically to meet society’s ideals competing with each other when it would benefit everyone to work together, thus exacerbating confrontation, hatred, and violence. In the “Eat the Bomb” series I bring the interactions into self and societal reflection. We fail to realize that our society’s standards are enforced for profit, hatred and war. The figures strain to eat a droplet shape, or “the bomb. The bomb in my pieces is benign in reality, but it is too big for the eater, it will clobber the orifice that tries to ingest it, suggesting that our society’s “ideals” that people live by might be suicidal. I use the imagery of the bomb as a symbol of domination, oppression, and destruction in today’s society. In my sculptures the conveyor of the bomb originates where examples of power symbolically originate; for example in the head, throat, heart, and genitals.