ÌÇÐÄÔ­´´vlog

Peter Hide: Steel’s not clay, and it can be, it is an extremely versatile material but it’s also contradicting almost, very resistant material it’s harder and stronger than any material used in sculpture, for the, you know, I mean steel only arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century and steel sculpture came along about sixty years later. And this was a material that had all sorts of different properties to any material really that had been used in sculpture before.

And that in a way led to abstraction partly that the new properties of steel and how it could be joined and cut and its strength and the fact that it was equally strong in tension and compression, which is like wood but it can be joined and cut in a way that wood can’t, it can be joined and cut without touching it actually.

When you, if you want to cut a bit of steel you use an oxyacetylene flame and you don’t have to, like with wood, you have to saw it with a mechanical and there’s contact, there’s vibration. But that, with steel can be cut even with a water stream, very, very high pressure and laser of course and all other things, and it can be joined too without touching, by welding, by fusing, by heat and fusing.

Peter Hide: Well we actually had quite a lot of steel and we would go sometimes, you know, Tony [Anthony Caro] and we’d all, we’d exchange information about where steel could be found and this and that and we would go up to Durham sometimes to Consett to the old steel mill there, you know, which was, had fantastic pieces of sheared off steel and end rollings like pastry cut. You know when you, with a rolling pin, you roll pastry, and the ends, the edges of the pastry are very interesting well that happens in steel especially in an old-fashioned mill.

Tony discovered those, they were fantastic. But I discovered these sheared off bits of plate which had soft edge rather like a skirting board around the house and I use them sometimes.

In those days, modern steel production, there were lots of old mills in England that were not very profitable I think, you know, but they were still going and so you could get a fantastic selection of stuff I don’t think there was a lot of difference.

Michael Lyons: Roy had just started a work in steel, and though I knew about working in steel, I knew about Gonzalez and Picasso I’d never actually seen anybody do it. And Roy went on a course I remember him walking up, we were walking back from the pub one night, and he said, I’ve just been on a course at BOC [British Oxygen Company]. And then he set up the welding shop.

And I’d done this like it was like a, it was like a disc with some structure in front of it and he said you could make that in steel. So indeed we went in this new welding shop and translated it into steel but it could quite easily been translated bigger into … it could have been done in plaster this carving plaster in the way that I’d intended it.

So I, in fact I gave it to the Museum of Steel Sculpture which Roy set up because we made it almost made it together, wasn’t like, really smart welding on it, it was, you know just trying to – the emphasis was on the art and getting the getting the art done. So that was the first piece of steel sculpture I ever made.

Michael Lyons:  Why I should work in steel I don’t know but I remember desperately at the moment I really fancy doing some work in stone strangely enough. Partly the background, partly that it seemed new, partly that I’d set off doing something with Roy Kitchen when I was at Wolverhampton and never really pursued it.

But it was this sense of the physical involvement that if you carve a piece of wood, for example, you spend, well you can cut it with chainsaws and things and gnash at it, things that are very big. But it’s the kind of involvement with steel that takes the whole of one’s being.

I’m not saying that you can’t do that with other materials, it would be silly to say that. But there is a very particular involvement with cutting and working with steel, although I must confess I physically don’t like working with steel as much as I did. I just don’t like doing it, too much like hard work.

°Ú…]

And one of the great things about steel is that, you know, people can use it in all sorts of ways. The bigger things I’ve done say in China and Mexico, I’ve like fabricated each, fabricated it into sections.

But with steel you can destroy the whole sculpture. You can start making a sculpture, oh god, I’m just going to cut that whole, the whole centre of this out and change it and moves about, which you can’t, I don’t think you can do that with carving. I can probably do it with wood if you peel it all together or something but not with the same sort of intensity that you can say, right, I’m having that out and then that bit will look better and grow. So I think in answer to your original question, a very, very close relationship, very close relationship with the material.

Anna Dyke: How do you feel about using steel as opposed to bronze?

Keir Smith: Well there’s not much I can do with it. I mean all I can do is kind of draw up plans and send it away to the laser cutters and then I have to send it away to someone to assemble it. There’s not a great deal I can do.

I mean bronze I can be involved in it at every stage and I know if I make a mistake I can go back and do something with it so, but there is something about the absolute kind of cruelty of the hardness of the steel which I really like, and I mean I’m not entirely sure if – I don’t have any plans to use it in the future, but there’s something about the sheer kind of geometricising precision I can get with it which is still compelling.