Three by Three: Guest Artists in Focus

QUESTION 2.    Forged flowers require translating softness and organic curves into a rigid material. What technical or intuitive decisions help metal read as alive rather than static?

• ANSWER 2.     The Human Hand. Steel products almost always are perfect: no dents or malformations: perfect machinery created by perfect machines. By taking an organic route for my creations, like flowers and branches and people, I am utilizing the errors and slip-ups of swinging a hammer. My striking and bending isn't done by a pre-programmed machine: it is the imperfect arc of my own body. An organic thing like a flower or leaf has unique growth and malformations. I am emulating nature by not being perfect, which visually gives a piece "life" as opposed to a cold and stiff "symbol" of a flower or leaf. None of my creations are twins: but they are all sisters.

Mitchell Edward
Artist Blacksmith/ Painter / Illustrator

MEDIUM:    steel and fire / paint and water/ pen and paper

BIO:    Edward is a freelance artist based in the Greater Toronto Area of Southern Ontario. He attended Sheridan College from 2011 to 2014, earning a Visual and Creative Arts Advanced Diploma with Honours and the Three Dimensional Award of Excellence. He later attended Fleming College in Haliburton, achieving an Artist Blacksmith Certificate and receiving the Artist Blacksmith Certificate Award for highest overall grade.

His work is driven by thematic contrast: light against dark, beauty against brutality, all expressed through bold composition and heavily divided chiaroscuro. Across steel, canvas, and ink, Edward treats every piece as a double-edged sword: an exploration of colour, grace, elegance, and form sharpened by muted darkness, tension, and unease.

Rooted in traditional craftsmanship, his practice blends fine art, illustration, and forged metal into a unified visual language. His goal remains the same: to create work that activates a viewer’s emotions, thoughts, and consideration. Art that fails to provoke is easily forgotten.

INSTAGRAM:    @Edwards.Iron.Garden

QUESTION 3.    Metal carries weight, heat, resistance, and risk. After years of working at the forge, what does metal continue to teach you—about patience, control, or yourself?

• ANSWER 3.     Metal continues to teach me the way of the world every time i start my fire. Often i will not have the raw stock necessary to start what i want to build: for example perhaps all my bars are too thick, and require an hour of hammering down. Sometimes my stock is preworked from old abandoned pieces, and needs to be bent straight again or re-hammered. This is very much like life, where everything you actually need IS right in front of you. The amount of effort needed to undo old mistakes, or "make lemonaide out of the lemons you have, instead of the lemons you want" is entirely random, like dealt playing cards. It is technically possible to take a large cube and hammer it into an extremely long wire, but is the effort worth the goal? Sometimes it is.

QUESTION 1.    Blacksmithing is often associated with utility and strength, yet your work leans strongly into florals and fantasy. What first pushed you to use forged metal as a vehicle for delicacy and imagination rather than function?

• ANSWER 1.    I started thinking this way almost immediately. Before I learned to forge my obsession in steel was limited to sheet metal and hardware. I created armour and shells, I drew knights and fantasy monsters and associated very much with that as my theme while at Sheridan College: "The hard surrounding the soft". I had the idea in my head of these two things being seperate.

  
  As I grew more, and experienced the world, I came to see what happens to "The Soft" regardless of it's protective "Hard" in all forms of life : I found a new "truer" theme in my mind, heart and soul. I decided the soft and hard I understood within myself needed to come together as one.

  
  The most beautiful things i experienced in life were simultaneously the most horrifying. A newborn pet that grows to old age and beyond. A young love-story that ends in tragedy. The youthful fire of achievement slapped down by failure. Over and over i saw the world as it is: yin and yang together. day and night are consistant, constant and inevitable. I wanted to express this and nothing has changed this realization in twelve years. Hardness is not a covering: it is a true state of being. Softness is not a weakness: it is the soft light that comes from a dangerous flame. Balance in all things, horrible and wonderful.

"Dancing Lovers", Mild Steel, 8 inches tall , 2025

All copyright and reproduction rights are reserved by Mitchell Edward.
Artwork may not be reproduced in any form without the artist's express written permission.

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"Standard Rose Pattern" Mild Steel, 4 to 8 inches long, 2023

"Standard Iron Maidens", Mild Steel, 6 to 10 Inches tall, 2025