GATE’S SALE TO AID UKRAINIAN BLACKSMITH TURNED SOLDIER
The metalwork gate up for auction at Canada’s national blacksmith’s conference next month is not your average clackety chain link job.
It has a lock, but at the moment, it does not even have hinges, so uncertain is its ultimate fate.
It might not even end up as a gate at all, more of a doorway-sized piece of art in intricately worked steel, bronze and copper. Because in addition to being a fundraiser for a Ukrainian blacksmith now fighting on the front lines as his family shelters in small-town Ontario, this gate is also a poignant work of professional artistry by his metalwork designer wife. She says it is a meditation on war’s disruption of time itself, how it can leave people like her suspended between chapters in their own lives, feeling as if she has fallen off a cliff but not yet hit the water.
Easily worth five figures as a public commission, the gate is also a public demonstration of the traditional craft of the dozen Ontario blacksmiths who were so moved by the family’s plight that they collaborated in building it the old-fashioned way, each choosing an element and building it with little more than hammer, heat, and ancient craftsmanship.
“That was my goal,” said Ontario artist blacksmith Mark Puigmarti, who chose to do the heavy frame using traditional joining techniques, such as punching a hole through one bar at the corner to make a slot for the other, so that they cool together into a perfectly smooth right-angled structural joint.
“Instead of just cut and weld pieces together, I wanted to do something in keeping with traditional techniques,” he said. For example, the corners in the top ornamentation don’t happen just by bending hot steel. They have to be hammered into shape as the metal distorts, just as the curled tapers have to be planned and executed in three dimensions, with the depth remaining constant as the thickness tapers away.
“I can’t say in words how lucky I was, in some ways, to pull that off,” he said.
The gate is to be auctioned in August at CANIRON XIII, the Canadian National Blacksmith Conference in Fergus, Ont. This is for the benefit of Irina Tereshchenko, a metalwork designer from Bila Tserkva near Kyiv, and her two daughters, a teenager and a toddler.
With her husband Sergei Skorobohatskyh, a blacksmith, she used to run a metalwork company and store with several employees, she said in emails with National Post, partly using translation software. Skorobohatskyh had also become prominent in the European community of artist blacksmiths, with awards for installations in Italy, Austria and Czechia.
When the war began, Irina and her girls fled across the border to Poland, until even that started to seem unsafe, and ended up in Canada, helped by a community effort to settle Ukrainian war migrants first in the area of St. Jacobs, Ont., near Waterloo, and later in permanent housing nearby. With local support, she found work close to her profession in the automotive parts industry, and was able to find affordable housing for herself and her girls close by her new Canadian support network.
Despite a chronic back injury that disqualified him in peacetime, Skorobohatskyh stayed to fight, as all Ukrainian men of fighting age were required to do. He has done so bravely on the front lines, to the point of receiving a “Defender of the Fatherland” medal for a combat mission last year. He is deploying to the front again this summer.
“My husband doesn’t tell me much, saves my nerves. But I know that during this year he saw, learned and experienced a lot of new things, a lot of things that will forever remain in his memory and that forever turned his mind around, changed the values and perception of the world. It is especially difficult for a soldier to return from the war,” Tereshchenko said. “Of course, I am proud of my husband and I know that he would not have acted differently if he suddenly turned back time. But without him alone with two children, also in another country, it’s very difficult morally.”
She said some of the money will go to equipping her husband with gear such as body armour, headphones, and night vision equipment, necessities that he has to pay for given the state of military finances in this second year of war.
“The idea of the gate came from my associations with the sense of time. It became blurry. I decided to depict a clock, because I suddenly realized that the unit of time had lost its meaning, I live out of habit: feed, wash, cook … no matter what day, number, what will happen tomorrow. Time has lost its meaning. Because I don’t know when and how things will change. I no longer make plans for the future. I don’t think about the development of my business, about employees, about the assortment of my store, about buyers and deadlines. Everything has changed. But here I met so many wonderful people, so much support that on the gates are my favourite curls with forged rivets and laconic lines. Steampunk elements speak of the complexity, chaos and uncertainty of this time.… The steampunk elements add to the idea of the alternative reality while the forged elements on the top and in the bottom remain balanced and sophisticated to represent the beauty and harmony of life itself as it goes on,” Tereshchenko said.
“He who looks at this gate, I wish he muses on the essence of the phenomenon of time. Though considered to be an essential aspect of human existence, time can become insignificant at an instant.”