The Tasmanian Craft Fair 2011 Emerging Artist...

Pete Mattila, at work

image1 - Pete Mattila, the process
image2 - Twisted Bar and Plate, 2009, Steel, brown patina with oil finish
image3 - Twisted Bar and Plate, 2009, Steel, brown patina with oil finish
image4 - Twisted Bar and Plate, 2009, Steel, brown patina with oil finish
image5 - Pete Mattila, the process
image6 - Split Surface Composition, 2011, Steel, Black Patina

Pete Mattila, his story

The strength and power of forged steel and the beauty and elegance of artistic expression are a unique combination brought together by blacksmith Pete Mattila, the Tasmanian Craft Fair's Emerging Artist for 2011.

Born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the US, and spending his childhood in America’s north around Lake Superior, it was in his teenage years that Pete began to experience the world of industrial expression.

"I travelled a lot as a teenager – in those days riding freight trains through almost every state in the US, working in all sorts of industries," he said.

It was during this time that he met Ani, a Tasmanian who later became his wife, and they moved back to her parents’ land in Jackeys Marsh, just south of Deloraine in northern Tasmania.
"I’ve always been very self-sufficient, during my travels in the US and then we built our own house at Jackeys Marsh," Pete said.

"In 2004 I started a course in heavy metal fabrication, and really liked working with metal as it has a mysterious quality of how it moves under heat and pressure."

“While on another trip back to the US I met a lot of blacksmiths, and became inspired by their work."

"I returned to Tasmania and did an industrial blacksmithing course with Geoff White of Tasmanian Blacksmithing and Engineering in Launceston. This really sparked my interest and I worked with him for two years, learning how metal worked with repeated forging and working by machinery or by hand."

But the industrial work could not hold Pete’s interest for long, and he enrolled in a Fine Arts degree at the University of Tasmania as well as a blacksmithing course at TAFE in Ultimo, NSW.

"My passion has been pulled out of something industrial, but now with an artistic reflection," he said. "My industrial knowledge allows me to make my own tools and have the basic forging skills, but then the artistic pieces come out of a mesh with the creative process."

Pete says that apart from his commissioned pieces, what comes out of his workshop evolves while it is being made.

"I love to watch how steel moves while I’m working with it, its shapes and forms – a lot of my design comes from investigation as I go," he said.
Pete is in the US for six months from May to October this year, as an Artist in Residence at Redstar Ironworks in Pittsburgh and conducting research into how the post-industrial era in places like Pittsburgh has changed the world of industrial blacksmithing, and how it melds as an artistic medium.

In 2011, the Craft Fair will present Tasmanian Contemporary Furniture Design in Venue 5 in the Community Complex (see venue map for location details).

Check out Pete at work... www.vimeo.com/channels/240369