Center for Metal Arts Adds Hot Sheet Metals Class to Popular Fold Form Workshop

Online, March 10, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Hot Sheet Forming: Planning and Practice is a natural sequel to the metal arts technique of fold forming, which is a popular workshop at the Center for Metal Arts. Both processes create dimensional forms with the manipulation of metal sheet, using different hot work techniques.

Vivian Beer, an innovative art furniture designer who exhibits and teaches out of New England, teaches this class out of her own explorations with manipulated hot sheet to create flowing forms in art furniture and outdoor sculpture. Beer developed her unique workshop when she could find nothing available nationwide. Her Hot Sheet Forming seminars are usually a one to two week session, but the Center for Metal Arts has condensed this workshop into a weekend, to make it more accessible to the busy professional.

The Hot Sheet Work class will examine, use and abuse sheet and plate metal as a material for architectural and artful forging. Students will learn techniques to sink, raise, bend, roll, weld, and construct dimensional forms in metal sheet. All exercises are designed to understand the specific possibilities of forming sheet material. In this hands-on workshop, students will generate a box full of samples for their own further explorations.

This is a class that combines original inventive thinking about the manipulation of hot sheet with the tools and techniques of the metal shop. Vivian Beer's own website www.vivianbeer.com, is a visual example of where one creative contemporary artist is taking the manipulation of hot sheet. Beer's pieces are often functional objects that blur the line between furniture and sculpture. Her pieces can be enjoyed for the technical brilliance, their witty commentary, and their subtle conceptual statements.

Students taking this workshop will have a chance to study with an innovative contemporary furniture designer. "My work is both formal, with a study of modern furniture design, and decorative, with a daydreamt mixture of images and objects," says Vivian Beer. "These are hotrods/chairs dealing in the imagery of attraction and precision of design."

The Center for Metal Arts is a fully-equipped teaching studio affiliated with the architectural forge studio of Fine Architectural Metalsmiths. Students are invited to browse the upstairs gallery museum of "sketches in iron" and old tools in the renovated 1890's Icehouse in the downstate New York Village of Florida.

The Center for Metal Arts offers easy online registration at www.centerformetalarts.com, or call the studio for more information. Ongoing one-day workshops in basic and master class topics are announced on a rolling basis on the website and on the Center for Metal Arts Facebook page.