About Me
My name is Jason Campbell and I am a blacksmith artist based in Carpinteria California.
How it began
I’ve been finding and collecting things my whole life, but after having kids and hanging out with them on the beach instead of running over it to go surfing, the hunt for cool rocks began. On occasion we found weird pieces of metal sticking out of a rocks, more dangerous than cool, but after finding what looked like a sword I asked really began asking, what is this stuff?
What it became
My blacksmith studio in Carpinteria gives me the tools and setting to forge new purpose into the material I have been collecting.
I make both functional and artistic products and works that preserve the corrosive history displayed on the material as I found it, but with the rust removed.
What is this stuff?
I continued to collect more and researching it’s origin I discovered that the state of California designated this industrial trash as a public hazard. Funding dedicated to its removal has been busy cleaning up the coast for years.
Most of this material is leftover hardware from the oil infrastructure that existed over a century ago. Picture the bolts holding piers together, rail track driven into the sand to support seawall riprap, plates and hinges, spikes, hooks and chains all haphazardly forgotten and eventually buried by the swell and sand.
As this material was slowly rejoining nature, a unique bit of history occurred. When it was abandoned it was just metal, but when I found it the specific type of metal commonly known as wrought iron had become commercially extinct globally in the 1960’s. No new Wrought iron was being made.
You have perhaps heard the term wrought iron, which is still used to to describe architectural and decorative iron work such as railings and gates, but this is rarely actually made with the material wrought iron.
A partially cleaned hoisting hook.
Commercially Extinct metal?
Going back millennia iron ore was worked into wrought iron, but it took lots of work. The metal would be forged and folded and forged and folded into itself forming a homogenized billet of iron, silica and carbon. This wrought(meaning worked) iron now had a unique property in that the silica had stretched into microscopic glassy needles running parallel to its length.
All this work folding and forging was expensive at industrial scales and was replaced by a blast furnace using air to homogenize the iron, silica and carbon. The shape of the silica in mild steel has lost it’s needle likeness, which doesn’t mean that much when comparing new mild steel and new wrought iron for a new project. But when it comes to corrosion resistance, wrought iron wins hands down both in the length or time it can last, and the beauty of the corrosive texture it develops.
In general, ancient iron artifacts are rare because iron oxidizes or rusts on earth and there is no way to stop that. You can slow it down with coatings, and remove it with abrasion, but it will inevitably decay into red dust.
The classic wrought iron wood like texture.
Fossilized meteorites of pre-nuclear industrial trash.
Both mild and wrought are undergoing what is technically referred to uniform corrosion, basically the exposed layer is oxidizing at a similar rate uniformly around the entire surface. However, wrought iron has those silica needles that act as a barrier or a railing that guides the corrosion into long narrow gutters that get clogged with the rust and form a little bit of resistant coating slowing the uniform corrosion in that gutter. That process keeps compounding on itself and the result is a visible wood like grain.
This unique corrosion texture specific to wrought iron can be coupled with other types of corrosion such as abrasion, where the metal is smoothed over by exposure to waves and sand. There’s also hardness differences in certain objects and it may be the outer layer is softer and developed deep pitting while the core develops the wood like texture.
The variety of textures and forms were incredible and hunting for it was like an Easter egg hunt. The metal is often found completely encased in a concretion of rust that has absorbed sand and small rocks, even glass and wood. These concretions can look like an ordinary rock, with no indication of what form of metal is within, but are distinct enough to spot them on a rocky beach.
There is a satisfying crack that can be heard when you split the right concretions open and the iron treasure inside is exposed for the first time in a century. It can often be pulled out and rinsed off with water revealing rust free metal.
There have been many times I gasped at what I found because it’s form is nearly complete such as a tool or a hoisting hook. There are also duds that contained something but have rusted away completely leaving behind the cavity of what it was such as a railroad spike. One unique example was a re-solidified iron oxide dust rail spike head, basically the same form but made from rust dust.
Cast iron often leaves a cavity inside a concretion but the iron has turned into a paste-like substance similar to oil paint but is water soluble and can be rinsed away.
Finding it was fun, but after years of collecting I had acquired a fairly substantial amount of material and needed to start getting this out there. Everyone I shared it with felt it was something completely unique and significant. How history, nature, science, and art can be present in these fossilized meteorites of pre-nuclear industrial trash.
An opportunity to move into a shared workshop came at the right moment in my life so I left the backyard forge behind to see where this project would take me.
My ever evolving workshop in Carpinteria.
Contact us
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