The ancient craft of blacksmithing is undergoing an artisanal renaissance in communities around Southwestern B.C., according to a new book that features photographs and biographical sketches of metalworkers, including a well-known Sunshine Coast artist who fuses form and function at his Roberts Creek forge.
Blacksmith Kelly Backs is one of 24 artists and craftspeople featured in Out of the Fire: Metalworkers along the Salish Sea, which will arrive in bookstores next month. Essays by Pirjo Raits are accompanied by lush photography by Dale Roth and Michele Ramberg.
Raits is a Victoria-based journalist whose first book, Out of the Woods: Woodworkers along the Salish Sea, spent weeks on B.C. bestseller lists in 2018. “It was kind of a rush,” she said. “Then I thought, who else can we look at? I knew of a few blacksmiths and welders. I realized that’s the one I want to do because there are no books about the people who are doing this work.”
Selecting the featured artists was a highly subjective process, Raits said. A conversation with one metalworker would result in an introduction to another. “It’s a cross section,” she said. “I just tried to get as many different kinds of metalwork in there as I could fit without overlapping too much.”
Seven of the characters Raits interviewed for the book are from Salt Spring Island, while others work in communities that range from Sooke to Ladysmith. Nearly a quarter of the artists are women working in the historically male-dominated field.
Through her interviews, Raits discovered that many of her subjects shared common traits beyond physical strength and dexterity. “A good percentage of them are recyclers,” she said. “They use scrap metal. Or they find metal and they use it and reconfigure it. A lot of them have been to art school. They are all passionate about what they do, and that’s what I looked for more than anything.”
Kelly Backs is the sole Sunshine Coast metalworker featured in the 224-page volume. His Tree Studios forge is a fixture of the Coast’s annual Art Crawl, when he sequesters curious onlookers at a safe distance while pounding red-hot metal, face-to-face with a flame that exceeds 2,000 degrees Celsius.
Backs’s story mirrors the metamorphosis that occurs in his studio, which is crowded with raw materials and works in progress. A high school teacher in Backs’s hometown of Niagara Falls sparked his interest in welding, which led to a job building railcars. After moving to Australia in 1997, he studied under a master blacksmith. Returning to Canada, he worked with studios in Vancouver and Pender Harbour before opening Tree Studios in 2010.
Today, from a workshop clad in corrugated metal, he serves clients in locations as far as California with a combination of custom metalwork and intricate jewelry-grade craftsmanship.
“For me, my work is all about the relationship that I create with my clients,” Backs said. “I try to give them what they need and use my artistic abilities to realize ideas. I try to match the designs with their surroundings or their lifestyle or their passions working with materials. And I love the challenge of it.”
For one of Backs’s current commissions, he is rendering a melody by Mozart into a staircase railing. He fashions each staff line at his anvil before welding laser-cut notes in place. Musical metalwork comes naturally; Backs is also an avid drummer.
Out of the Fire includes a short essay on the history of metalworking and a glossary. The book is published by Heritage House Publishing, and includes over 100 colour and black-and-white photographs.
