Anvil Ironworks Open Houses

By Becky Cairns

Sparks will fly as the temperature rises this May when Anvil Ironworks set up an open house to entertain the public with their creativity, turning ordinary material into flowers and insects.  You will also get the chance to take home affordable, spectacular features that your friends will envy. 

Anvil Ironworks is a workshop that specialises in creating contemporary sculpture and traditional ironwork and this will be their fourth year running in holding an open house as part of Fiveways artists group.

Alan Williams and Paul Wells are the artistic blacksmiths behind Anvil Ironworks.  Alan graduated in 2001 from Brighton University, Paul in 1999 from Hereford National School of Blacksmithing and they joined forces in 2005.

They work independently and collaborate on various projects utilizing everything that is steel, copper, glass and stone from objects that have either been found or recycled, putting new uses and a new source of life into them.  Both have tremendous passion in what they do and aim to engage, inspire and entertain with their work.

The open house exhibition will show sculptures and affordable metal art created from their talented hands.  It will include traditional blacksmithing pieces such as tongs, pokers, fireguards, trivets and candlesticks to furniture incorporating locally sourced wood including Elm, Oak, and Burch along with free forms of organic ironwork.  

It will be open every weekend in May from 11am to 5pm and there will also be live forging demonstrations from 1pm every Saturday and Sunday throughout the month, where you have the opportunity to buy freshly made and polished works of art.  Their ethos is "to keep traditions alive, but also to recycle and to bring in new, sort of, artistic methods to traditional blacksmithing."

If you get too hot around the blazing fire then you can relax with a delicious cake and a thirst-quenching cup of tea.

As well as showing at their open house, Anvil will also be exhibiting simultaneously at Ditchling village during this year's Brighton Festival as part of the Fiveways artists group and there will be a three month exhibition of large sculptures dotted throughout the garden at Borde Hill Heritage Gardens, Sussex High Weald, Haywards Heath from the first week in July till the last week in September this year.

You can find Anvil Ironworks at Southdown Livery Stables, Bear Road, Brighton, BN2 6AB, or at 222 Ditchling Road, and also with the Fiveways artists group in the open house brochure.

For further information, you can call them on 01273 686 404 or e-mail them at info@anvilironworks.co.uk

Posted: 5th of May 2011

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