On Friday, October 16, Urmas Lüüs’ exhibition ON BLOOD AND IRON will be open at A-Gallery, reflecting on the vitality and functions of blacksmithing as an archaic form of handicraft.
The red iron ore has been interpreted in mythological imagery as the blood of the mother earth for millennia. The first clay melting furnaces were molded with a female emblem, into whose body a fertilizing air penetrated through a phallic nozzle and slag-like slag flowed from the vulva. The stumps of iron from the furnace were formed into tools, and the blacksmiths threw things as a heart into their veins, where they became the blood that bound humanity. This blood heralded the end of Bronze Age technology and watered the flowers that were emerging on the battlefields with plenty of blood.
Having studied ethnographic materials, helped to carry out experimental-archeological iron smelting experiments, and weakened as a metal artist in identity crises, I felt a growing need to reflect on the nature of blacksmithing skills at the roots. I viewed blacksmithing as an elementary survival skill. I decided with two hands in my pocket to enter the forest devastated by modern negligence as a post-urban nomad and leave it with an iron sharpening tool to help me build, build and protect myself from danger. The action was an organic continuation of previous creative work in the post-catastrophic world of fiction.
Big thanks to Ott Pulst, Erle and Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo, HDK Steneby.