A Dark Tale

Elizabeth Brim is one of a handful of women blacksmiths and has made her name with sculptures that question received ideas about gender roles from her Southern upbringing, often through references to fairy tales she enjoyed as a girl.

"A Dark Tale" features a tiara fit for a princess, but the medium of forged steel, with its heavy weight and dark color, gives it an ominous feel.

Brim made the pillow using an inflation technique for iron and steel that she invented in 1992, when she forged her first tiara and wanted to make a pillow for it to sit on.

At the Penland School of Craft, where she has been involved since the early 1980s, she and some artist friends were trading ideas about things they wanted to make. They wondered, “What if we welded two squares of steel, then blew hot air into the object?”

Brim tried this. and it worked; the hot air inflated the steel into a pillow form that maintained its shape as it cooled. Brim has since taught the technique at numerous workshops at Penland and elsewhere.