Author: Emma Lodes|Emma Lodes
BANG! BANG! Amongst the foliage of a jungly, eccentric Highland Park backyard, the harsh sound of hammer blows on steel crash from inside a 25-foot, weather-worn Sioux-style tipi. Inside, a forge’s red hot glow bathes the interior in a fiery light, illuminating an assortment of hammers, anvils, and curious homemade metal tools strewn on crude wooden shelves and strung up on the canvas walls.
Bent over the forge, 2,000 degree steel bar in hand, artist-blacksmith Heather McLarty places the bar on an anvil and proceeds to whack it vigorously with a hammer. Two minutes later, the crude chunk of metal is transformed into a beautiful, delicate leaf. McLarty’s steel leaf is one of the finishing touches for a brand new gate on campus, situated at the entrance to Kemp Stadium between Swan Hall and Alumni Gymnasium. The gate, which is almost complete, is an intricately designed montage of abstract sports-related objects and human silhouettes frozen in active poses. McLarty has been working on the gate for two months straight in her tipi studio, without a single day off.
President Veitch asked McLarty to create the gate two years ago, but she was unable to begin the project until the recent completion of Swan Hall. In the meantime, McLarty made the copper Presidential Medal for Distinguished Service artwork on the south side of the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Center. Veitch discovered McLarty through a show of hers at the Avenue 50 Gallery, and after seeing the beautiful and unique gate that guards her funky Highland Park home, he knew this one-of-a-kind artist’s work was needed on campus.
McLarty’s original, inventive pieces are informed by her experience designing stage props across the United States. The art of theater tech commands great creativity in crafting; making props of almost anything, from almost anything. Through theater tech, she developed an affinity for steel, and decided to quit theater to embark on a creative journey back in time, into the ancient world of blacksmithing. To learn about the ancient art, McLarty traveled to the Czech Republic and studied Louis XVI ornament and tooling with master smith Alfred Habermann. McLarty now uses her skills as a blacksmith to create art, a self-prescribed “artist blacksmith.” Blacksmithing is also known as forging– both are the process of heating steel to extreme temperatures and manually altering its shape.
McLarty flirts with fire; she brings delicate and beautiful artifacts to life from the flaming depths of a 2,300 degree forge through her creative eye for design. The design of Occidental’s upcoming gate centers around the theme of athletics, but is not an exact representation of Occidental Sports; it’s broader and more abstract.
“To me it’s about play. Some of the athletic references are more literal; some are tweaked,” McLarty said. She pointed to a web-like net in the corner. “Like this one. A lot of sports have nets in them; goals, rackets, lacrosse sticks. But there’s also a spider down here who I think of as the goalie.”
The gate is one of McLarty’s biggest projects yet. The large scale of the project and the small space inside the tipi have led McLarty to collaborate with friends by bringing forged pieces to a friend’s shop for assembly, and using another friend’s yard to lay out the gate in its entirety. But she has created every piece of the gate inside her tipi studio.
The tipi studio came to be for practical reasons. McLarty’s house is a Los Angeles City Historic Monument, so she was unable to build a new structure on the property. “My husband had the idea for the tipi. It’s historic, temporary, and they were developed to have a fire in them, so that wasn’t a problem,” McLarty said. Unfortunately, the tipi is at the bitter end of its life.
“Sun, pollution, and air are hard on the fabric. We’re about to change to a new cover,” McLarty said. The forge itself has been a threat to the tipi– After 13 years without incident, the tipi recently caught fire. “I was working on a piece and suddenly saw blue flames climbing up the wall,” McLarty said. She pointed to a patch on the side of the cover– the handiwork of her husband, who fortunately works with fabrics.
McLarty is active in the small but growing Los Angeles community of artist blacksmiths. She is the president of Adam’s Forge workshop, and teaches classes there. She is passionate about teaching and passing on her skills and love of blacksmithing to others.
“[Blacksmithing] uses all of a person. It’s very physical but it’s also challenging intellectually, artistically, and creatively. It comes from the heart and the imagination, but there’s a lot of science and math involved,” she said. “I like feeling part of a continuum of a craft that has an incredibly long history– all the way back to the bronze age. To take that and build on that human endeavor and take it into the future is especially exciting for me.”
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