Forge: Hearth and Home

Readers enter the household and workshop of Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas, now led by his sons since his death in 2014. The family forge is the locus of aesthetic re-productive and co-productive performance. This hive of activity is a porous space where rhythms of life and work intertwine. Within its cultivating atmosphere, artisans and materials perform and are formed. Artisan skill is always emergent, practiced, but never obtained, constantly shifting between liminal transient thresholds of the “as is” and “as if.” Intense muscularity and force combine with a maternal-like nurturance, tenderness, and care proffering an attentiveness that queers and oversteps stereotypically divided gender roles. The coppersmith maker is really a doula who births self, community, and things. Exceptionally multimodal, metal-smithing combines small and large muscle movements, fine and gross motor coordination, responsive rhythm, cadence, sensitive tonal hearing, touch, and comprehension of aural and visceral vibration. In contrast to Gibson’s “ecology of perception” emphasizing perceptive navigation via surfaces, optics, and visuality, what is evident here is navigation via blind-visuality. How can the “mole theory” help us understand how copper-artisans navigate? How do they synthesize perceptions of tones, densities, light and dark values, sounds, pitch, temperature, vibrations, smells, weight, balance, and presence?