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Forging a passion into an art form
holton shapes v
Nathan Holton shapes a bar of metal on the anvil. - photo by Photo by Calli Arnold

Crickets and the occasional train were the accompaniment for the work of Nathan Holton and Lee Bloodsworth.

ClinkclankClinkclank
ClinkclankClinkclank
ClinkclankClinkclank.

Holton strikes a scalding steel bar against an anvil with his hammer. Then, Bloodsworth follows with the slam of his sledgehammer. A shape reluctantly begins to form as golden sparks fly from the red metal in no particular direction.

A sight that would be all too familiar centuries ago seemed so bizarre and enchanting on a recent crisp evening off Springfield-Egypt road.

Holton and Bloodsworth are reviving a nearly lost craft to inspire quality, value and pride in the functional household objects they hope will become heirlooms and to embrace the personal fulfillment they find from the laborious and spectacular art.

They took the name “Bender and Planer” for their work, incorporating blacksmithing and carpentry in one title.

Building a forge

Both inherited a knack for craftsmanship from their fathers. Holton’s father and grandfather were carpenters.

“I’ve just been around it, any hand-crafted things, all my life,” Holton said, adding that he’s built furniture.

Bloodsworth’s father was an aircraft welder.

“It was something dad wanted me to get away from,” Bloodsworth said, “(but I) just always had fun doing stuff, making stuff. Why get away from it? I’m good at it.”

Now in their early 30s, Bloodsworth works at a document storage warehouse in Savannah and Holton is a student in  theatre set design and construction at Armstrong Atlantic State University.

They met 12 years ago at Wild Adventures in Valdosta, repairing rollercoaster rides and retrieving stranded guests when rides malfunctioned.

“It was fun,” Bloodsworth said. “It was really, really fun. We were both young and wanted something that was fun instead of just a job.”

They worked odd jobs, just getting by, and tapped into different vocations during their early 20s. Holton said they’d both “dabbled in welding” and worked on old cars, and they’d researched blacksmithing while living around the Georgia-Florida border.

Holton said that he had been interested in learning to be a blacksmith almost two years before he started. Both Bloodsworth and Holton remember watching a man in Prague, Czech Republic, hammering away in a square as spectators watched. They said what struck them was not what he was doing, making coins and such to pass time, but the rugged aesthetic of the objects — candelabras, chandeliers — he was selling.

In Tallahassee, Fla., Holton said he began researching metalwork and gathering items to build a forge when he wasn’t running errands for a wealthy man.

“I was a gopher for a rich guy,” said Holton. “I just ran his errands. I went and bought his groceries and everything.”

In the meantime, Bloodsworth was wondering if he’d ever be able to work with his hands again. In 2001, he was injured in a construction accident.

“I was disabled at the time,” he said. “I was working and two cinder block walls fell in on me. It broke my back and for the longest time, I was told I couldn’t do anything.”

He said he was frustrated by the experience and that he “felt like I was never going to be me again.”

Bloodsworth said that’s when he started forging metal. He would swing his hammer over and over to make knives out of railroad spikes and other items until he felt like he was getting the hang of it.

“I’m grateful,” he said. “Here was something that I couldn’t do, but I like to do, work on things, tinker, make things happen. My completion is not by the end of a spreadsheet, it’s by ‘look, it’s done. I made it.’ Being able to do that and getting that completion. It’s brought me back to feeling like I’m not disabled. Even though I have somewhat of a disability, to me, it’s not.”

He said he believes that taking up the trade was “good therapy” for him mentally and physically.

“I can sit around and sling the sledgehammer and do some major damage and have no more back pain than anybody else,” Bloodsworth said. “I think a lot of it’s from working hard and building a structure around that, the muscle structure that’s rehabilitated me in a way that’s good.”

Savannah

In 2004, they moved to Savannah in pursuit of a blacksmith, John Boyd Smith.

“(There aren’t) many places to learn,” said Bloodsworth, “and it was like that’s the guy to jump under and apprentice, if you can. He was doing a lot of artistic stuff, he still does.”

Smith is known for many of his sculptures and architectural pieces, such as scones and gates, around Savannah, much of it focusing on Low Country wildlife.

They started a guild, the Southeast Georgia Blacksmiths, an affiliate of the Ocmulgee Blacksmith Guild in Atlanta.

“That started off with me, Lee and another guy sitting in a backyard,” Holton said. “Now it’s grown to 50-60 people just in this area blacksmithing. It’s kind of gotten out of our hands, and we really don’t do much except meetings every month now.”

The area smiths will share work and techniques with other guild members and, if a blacksmith specializes in something, such as knives, the members will recommend those specialists to customers looking for something particular.

“All of us finally found each other in a local region and we meet every third Saturday,” Bloodsworth said. “If somebody’s learned something, you show something, pass it on.”

They said they’ve done a number of re-enactments for living history venues, and that people are usually blown away because they don’t leverage any technology, they work with the way people did for centuries.

“You can only do so many re-enactments, then that’s just going to be stagnant,” said Bloodsworth about the vitality of blacksmithing.

“It’s not pushing the art,” said Holton.

Bender and Planer

After a few years of practice and working with other metal workers, they started branding their work under the name Bender and Planer.

For now, blacksmithing is a more like a hobby for Holton and Bloodsworth — Bender and Planer is part-time.

Much like the way they speak, Holton and Bloodsworth intuit each other’s rhythms and style as they hammer. They know each other’s strength and how much is needed to move metals, no matter how stubborn or malleable.

“So, we kind of quicken the process working together,” Holton said, “and we’ve kind of adapted our own style to everything, which is kind of rare because a lot of people have power hammers that do this.”

They tap their hammers in different ways to signal when to start, stop and set the tempo.

“We do a couple of variations of stop, speed up, and it’s all a rhythm,” Holton said. “It’s all on lead guy with a small hammer and two guys with the big sledgehammers and they’re going to hit wherever the person with the smaller hammer hits and they’re just driving them, using them and moving them where they want to just off hammer swings.”

Their candelabras are gruff, as if the metal stretched and bent and twisted itself to look that way, abstract. That’s what makes them interesting.

“We try to make things work in a modern world that would work in the 1700s too, just kind of not put a timeline on it,” Holton said.

Holton and Bloodsworth like that their sculpture and items tell the story of how they got that way. They want to include photographs of their furnishings to show customers the effort put into the chandelier or knife set.

In Holton’s point of view, artists who forge metal will keep the trade relevant and alive, as they sculpt through blacksmithing.

“Whatever your mind can think of, the possibilities are endless,” he said. “It has to grow and evolve into a modern era. I really love that part — you can make anything.”

They work with wood as well at the warehouse where Bloodsworth works so that no one will steal their materials or tools. They say they want to be commissioned to build something large, like a gate, or some spectacular furniture piece. They have bid on some projects in downtown Savannah.

“What happened to pieces of furniture that you have that your grandmother had that her grandmother gave her?” said Holton. “You don’t see things like that hardly anymore. I want to make stuff like that. I want something that I can pass on to my children and so on.”

Just live off it

Bloodsworth moved to Effingham seven months ago after getting married. Holton has lived in the county for two years.

Between work and school and family and friends and life, they manage to fit in about 16 hours of forging a week.

They say that even if they never make a living doing metalwork, unless their bodies give out and cannot do the work, neither can imagine their lives without the hammers and iron.

“Ideally, I’d like to have the shop, the metal shop, live working,” said Bloodsworth, adding that he’d also like a small farm and to raise chickens. “Have, not like a job that I have now, which I’m thankful for, but one that’s ‘I want to go to work’ not ‘I have to go to work,’ the freedom to just live off of it.”

Said Holton: “I want to do this every day — walk out my house with my coffee out to my shop and go right to work.”

To them it’s more than just an artistic medium or a hobby; the labor of blacksmithing enriches them.

“It’s the most rewarding thing in the world to make something and somebody actually like it,” Holton said. “I think that’s the reason I do it. It’s that pride and that excitement of just that I made that; that’s awesome, that’s beautiful. It used to be just a piece of metal and now it serves a purpose. But there’s nothing better than hammering out metal, just the way that it moves, it’s exciting to see how it moves.”

“At the end of the day,” said Bloodsworth, “you walk away and you’re forearms are really tight, your biceps are really tight, your hands are really hard and you feel like you’ve put in a good day’s work.”