The turning point in Marsha Trattner’s life as an artist came when she welded sculpting and blacksmithing. For Trattner, being a blacksmith is all about transformation: “You’re taking the metal and when it’s heating up, it’s changing its molecular structure. And there’s something very powerful in that moment,” she said.
Trattner, who works out of her own studio – She-Weld in Red Hook, Brooklyn – said she’s the only person in the city currently teaching blacksmithing.
She finds in her forge a much-needed break from the digital, tech-driven world.
“Here you can basically take something that is nothing, just a piece of metal, and you can turn it into something…. I think there’s just a lot of satisfaction in that, in still having some physicality and learning something creative and learning something that really has that history behind it,” Trattner said.
