Forging ahead Students learn the ancient art of blacksmithing

Perhaps when you were in high school, you took a class called “shop.” In it, you learned how to build a bookshelf or how to rewire a broken appliance that somebody’s uncle donated to the school. Perhaps you also took a class called “art,” in which you studied primary colors and vanishing points.

If you are a student at Deer-Isle Stonington High School this year, you have had the chance to combine both technical skills and artistic vision with a blacksmithing class taught by your industrial arts teacher and an artist-in-residence from Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

The Collaborative Residency Program, funded in part by a $40,000 grant from Surdna Foundation, expands the studio-based learning model that Haystack, a summer craft school in Deer Isle, has developed to reach out to the year-round community. Since January, blacksmith and sculptor Douglas Wilson, who lives on Little Deer Isle and teaches periodically at Haystack, has been meeting with six students three mornings a week for 80 minutes in Dennis Saindon’s industrial arts class. Wilson also has arranged for other blacksmiths to come to the class to share techniques and insights with the students, and the class has visited the studios of off-campus blacksmiths.

As a group, the students have learned more than how hot the metal has to be to make it bend. They also have developed business skills for a career in blacksmithing. Their goal in class was to find a client, discuss a project with that client, and then create the item the client requested. In this case, the client was the front office for the school. The administrative team there needed a holder for outgoing mail, and they wanted it to be functional but also decorative and somewhat representative of local scenery.

The students visited the office, spoke with the “clients” and went to the drawing board, where each student created his own design. Then as a group, they culled the best ideas and came up with a final version that fits the utilitarian goal and also has the grassy shapes and swirls of marshland. For the last several weeks, the students have been busy turning blueprints into a product by using anvils, forges, coal fires and steel.

“I’m not trying to give anybody salable trades as much as give them a good thorough understanding of what the trades are about so the kids can pursue what they like. I don’t care if a kid is making a birdhouse or a boat. It’s about igniting the desire,” said Saindon, who studied blacksmithing last summer at Haystack. “Here are artists making a living and bringing this sense of reality to the students in this class. The students are inspired. They are excited to be working with their hands and to see the connections with math and history.”

The added benefit for Saindon, who also teaches boat building, welding and machinist skills, is that with another expert in the classroom, he has more time to give individual attention to his students.

For artist Doug Wilson, the class provides the chance to honor his craft at a fundamental level.

“I love to teach,” said Wilson. “I’m interested in teaching people about the arts and about doing good work. I feel it’s a responsibility of mine to pass on the skills of the trade but also my vision of what we creative people pass on to the world.”

Since its founding in 1950, Haystack has sought to teach traditional craft, inspire creativity and instigate dialogues in the craft world. Since 1995, Haystack has offered residencies to local high school students on the Blue Hill peninsula. By bringing professional dancers, book artists and blacksmiths into the classroom to work alongside students, Haystack hopes to spread the message that it is not only a studio school where pots are thrown and glass is blown. It is also a community resource.

“We are not indigenous,” said Stuart Kestenbaum, director of Haystack. “But these programs help us connect with the community. The kids here join the whole lineage of makers that goes back as far as 1950 and to several countries. It is every bit as profound as the sessions in our summer season.”

The students, of course, have not missed the message their teachers and their community craft school is sending them.

Referring to Wilson, a senior from Sedgwick said: “This is time he could be at home doing his work, but he’s with us and it’s really cool. You can come here and let out your creativity. You do math. You do science. But you’re not sitting at a desk with a book in your hand. It’s a lot more fun this way.”

His buddy added: “I look forward to this class. I want to come. I have fun when I am here and I don’t want to leave. History and math classes are them putting info into you. This is you letting you out.”

The students are graded by Saindon rather than Wilson and gain points for their work in the shop as well as on written tests and reports. Saindon likes to think they also develop a strong sense of pride that moves beyond any grading system.

Since many of the residents on Deer Isle are self-employed, the students do not have to look far to find ways to apply the knowledge they are learning as young blacksmiths. While several of the students have definite plans to go on to college or technical schools, they were all considering the possibilities of being successfully self-employed in a state that often bids farewell to its young people after high school. As blacksmiths or boat builders or machinists, they could reasonably consider establishing careers in Maine.

The next step, said Saindon and Wilson, is getting the students to work on individual projects.

“Even if they never take up another hammer, they’ll always be better consumers and more thoughtful about the things they bring in to their lives,” said Wilson, who said that if he had been professionally commissioned to build the mail holder, he could charge between $500 and $1,000 for his work.

He likes to tell the students the same thing his mentor told him years ago: “Always do the best work you can. There’s always room at the top.”