Never underestimate the impact of a high-school art class — it might just blossom into a 33-year career.
In 1978, at age 12, Maria Cristalli moved with her family from California to Mercer Island. Once enrolled at Mercer Island High School, she took a pivotal jewelry-making class with art teacher Laurie Hall (now a jeweler in Portland). Right away, Cristalli was intrigued by the properties and possibilities of metal — how you could bend and texturize it, render it shiny or matte, all with a little heat and pressure. She’d encountered a kind of alchemy.
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Fast forward a decade or so, including a detour spent studying photography at the University of Washington, and Cristalli’s early interest in metalsmithing resurfaced. This time it was blacksmithing that caught her attention, when she saw the age-old art form in action at the Okanogan Family Barter Faire in Tonasket, Washington, in the early 1990s. The spark was rekindled, at a much larger scale.
“There is a direct link between me taking jewelry classes in high school and me becoming a blacksmith,” Cristalli says. The only difference: “I went big instead of small.”
After taking a welding class in the mid-1990s, Cristalli visited the legendary Black Dog Forge in Seattle. It was love at first anvil. Founded in 1989 by blacksmith artists Louie Raffloer and Mary Reid Gioia, the metal shop was located down a back alley in Belltown. In the basement, a former film vault (a veritable bunker) served as a rehearsal studio for grunge bands including Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. But Cristalli was hooked on the heavy metal upstairs. “I fell in love with all the tools and the fire,” she recalls.
Now three decades into her career, she’s still enchanted by the tools and the flames, which she uses to create large-scale sculptures reflecting the natural landscape of central and eastern Washington. Curious cup-forms that grow in lichen, the craggy surface of cliffs, the silvery shine of charred wood, even the gold glint of sun — all wrought in forged steel. (Stream the episode now, or watch the broadcast premiere on Cascade PBS, tonight at 8:50 p.m.)
Blacksmithing takes decades to master, and the longer Cristalli stayed at Black Dog Forge, the more she realized she had to learn. So she embarked on a run of workshops and apprenticeships: at Haystack Mountain School in Maine; Fire Mountain Forge in Eatonville, Washington; Flicker Forge in Ballard; and Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. At last Cristalli was ready to build her own forge somewhere outside of Seattle.
She chose Cle Elum. “I grew up in southern California, and we camped a lot, so the pine trees really spoke to me,” Cristalli says. She moved there in 2010, to a pine-forested slope just outside of town. The studio houses hammers and chisels in all shapes and sizes (many of which she made herself), anvils and welding tools, a couple of enormous power hammers and a forge.
After years of making commissioned architectural ironwork such as gates, garden features and decorative scrolls, Cristalli is now leaning into the sculptural side of her work. Recent projects include her textured and polished take on the basalt columns found across the region, which captivate Cristalli both in their stark surfaces and as evidence of geologic time.
“You can see how, at some point something changed and the rocks went sideways… and it was probably millions of years in between,” she noted on a walk at Yakima River Canyon. “I find it really fascinating… It reminds me that our lifetime is so short.”
In another sculpture, “Gift of the Sun,” Cristalli nods to more evidence of massive geological forces and regional history with a reference to coal. Made from prehistoric plants compressed under massive forces, coal was long ago nicknamed “buried sunshine.” The piece is installed publicly and permanently on the grounds of Suncadia Resort in Roslyn, and resembles rays of sunshine shooting up and outward from the earth.
“I have really been enjoying the direction I'm going,” Cristalli says. “Using the natural world around me as inspiration. I want to keep going.”
Watch Art by Northwest Season 3, Episode 3, featuring blacksmith Maria Cristalli, and stay tuned for five more new artist profiles from across the region. While you wait, catch up on past episodes of Art by Northwest, nominated for two Northwest Regional Emmy Awards.
