Somatisms: Corporeal Idioms Translated
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The project Somatisms: Corporeal Idioms Translated offers a series of visual translations of English language idioms based on the human body into the vernacular of my particular dialect of forged steel. Each hammer blow plays the same role the word does in written and spoken language—both are the building blocks with which we deliver meaning in a finished work.
Just like the process of writing drafts of texts, where sentences will be struck from a paragraph, or words swapped out in favor of other more succinct building blocks, many hammer blows will never be seen in the end—their marks will be obliterated by planishing blows, or maybe they were rough forging blows whose marks were always intended to wash away through further forging, like waves lapping over footprints in the sand in the tidal line on a beach. The unseen-in-the-end strikes of the hammer are used to hew the rough meaning out, never intended to be present in the final finished iteration.
In spite of their inevitable intended erasure, each and every hammer blow serves a specific and distinct purpose. The textures, surfaces, creases, dents, and divots that are chosen to be visible in the final composition become the translation we read in the end.
Likewise, just as idioms are the most vivid and colorful aspect of language and carriers of meaning, the aspect that gives language its allure, and reflects the collective culture of the people fluent in it, the malleability of steel and the resulting forms and textures that appear when leveraging its plasticity is and are what gives steel its most vibrant ability to carry within it the richness of meaning.
