Thicket

"Thicket" is based on the hammer that Tom Joyce uses most frequently, chosen from among the hundreds that line the walls of his studio, each shaped slightly differently to strike metal in a unique way.

Cast in clusters, the hammerheads in the sculpture evoke "cells in the process of dividing" and the stainless-steel rods "a kind of creative energy or life force moving out from its source in unpredictable ways."

The Project Ten Ten Ten commission enabled Joyce to push his work in new directions. The hammerhead clusters are cased in molds created by 3D printing, marking the first time Joyce used this process in a public art project. "Before this technology was introduced, deeply undercut molds such as these would have been all but impossible to cast using conventional foundry methods," said Joyce.

Further, the process to assemble "Thicket" was a new challenge. The steel rods were inserted into the hammerhead clusters onsite to make individual asterisk-like forms that the artist combined into a densely packing cube. It was his first time creating "a complicated structure that cannot be precisely determined beforehand but must be intuitively woven together once piece at a time," he said.

Uniting all of Joyce's endeavors is his deep interest in the history of iron and the social, political, and economic implications of working with it. Through extensive research and close study of objects, Joyce has become an expert on metalwork, exemplified by his curatorial role in the exhibition and book, "Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths."