Joshua Kuensting
Garden Gate Study

Forged and fabricated scrap steel

NFS


This gate was the first steel fabrication/forging project that I planned out and completed. It was make from scrap pieces of steel found around the iron studio. The main outside frame as forged out of an old jail bar frame (note the squished bar segments in the top right corner). The rock formation is welded together plate steel left over from my first blacksmithing class taken this summer with Philip Baldwin. The pickets and leaves we forged out of 1/4” round bar cut offs. With the help of Maria Cristalli who was the excellent instructor of the garden gate class, I was able to reuse scrap steel and turn it into a piece that taught me about the importance of planning, the beauty of details, the need for control while using the power hammer, the strength of the mortise and tenon joint and the enjoyment of creating volume in steel by beating it with a hammer into a wooden stump. The iris flower has been the main decorative motif in my ceramic work and this gate showed me how to change my 2D brushwork into a 3D object.