“I hit, beat, torture, manipulate, crush, squeeze, twist, punch holes in and hammer all those pieces of metal into shape,” said Evan Wilson, artist and blacksmith.
This is how he turns copper, bronze, iron and steel into furniture and firepits, leaves, berries, wings and hands, and, sometimes, the body of Jesus.
“It’s a mixture of brute force and finesse,” he said.
Wilson, 37, said his work is an emotional experience, and sometimes a spiritual revelation.
“For me, it’s become a way of understanding my own, and our universal, coming back to God. Of relating to the God who calls us to suffer and to grow,” he said.
At times he’s focused on being the smith who shapes the metal, but other times he feels more like the thing being shaped.
“I hit this material like I mean it. I really clobber it. But every hammer blow is at just the right angle, just the right amount, the right temperature, the right location,” he said.
What he’s doing is bringing about a “loving transformation.”
“But from the perspective of the metal, it’s like ‘Oh my God, stop beating me!'” he said.
Wilson isn’t just using his artistic imagination; he has lived it.
A search for truth and meaning
Wilson was received into the Eastern Orthodox church in 2023, but was raised evangelical Protestant. Wilson was all of 7 years old when he began to note the logical inconsistencies of a “sola scriptura” approach to doctrine. As he grew, he kept finding more questions than anyone in his community could answer, and the faith of his childhood had less and less of a grip on him.
“It left me with a lot of angst,” he said. “I never threw away Christ, but I always wanted to figure out what the deeper value of this story was.”
As an adult, seeking a life of meaning, he spent time in Afghanistan working for a nonprofit that taught literacy and offered pregnancy care.
“I lived in a mud hut with an ex-Taliban member, had a dog, rode my bike to work. It was an awesome time, but very difficult to reconcile the God I was told about as a child with what was occurring there,” he said.
He saw so many people, especially women and children, who seemed trapped and forgotten.
When Wilson returned to the United States, he took up with Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that serves the homeless in Austin, Texas.
“I could tell there was something embodied or incarnate in the faith that was in action there,” he said.
That something wasn’t picturesque. He recalls working surrounded with what founder Alan Graham called “the bouquet of Christ,” the aroma of incontinent and unbathed bodies and crack smoke.
“We served them as we serve Christ,” he said.
Wrestling with the Lord
Wilson still struggled with his faith, but Loaves and Fishes is where he began to use his hands. He ran a workshop teaching the homeless to build wooden bird houses and tree swings, so they could have some shot at supporting themselves. His program invited journeymen to come and host workshops, and this included a dozen master blacksmiths from around the world.
“They were super generous, and I learned a ton,” he said.
That is when blacksmithing began to compel him, and it eventually became his main focus. It was not a smooth or graceful transition.
“My wife and I had our first son in 2020, I lost my job, and I got my first commission all in the same year,” he said.
That first commission was a Stations of the Cross. He calls it the beginning of his salvation, as he carefully crafted the tiny bodies acting out the suffering and death of Christ.
He first made the figures out of plasticine clay and shaped them with wooden replicas of his smith tools, to make sure he’d be able to form them from metal without using his hands. He literally wrestled with the little bodies as he worked.
“Pushing Christ’s arm just so, not thinking but feeling that; the tilt of the head here, the Roman soldier hammering the nails in. That’s how I was converted,” he said.
Conversion by way of art
Over the next four years, he continued to get commissions for religious art, but he himself was not yet fully converted. It was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as the world around him fell apart, the shape of his heart slowly changed.
“It was a combination of the art I kept getting asked to make, the sinking in of the reality of fatherhood, and maybe also the higher awareness of mortality,” he said.
At one point, an Orthodox family asked him to make a cross for their icon corner. He took the commission, and his client admired the finished piece, especially the lineal, almost wood-like grain of the metal. He explained that it was real wrought iron, something no longer commercially available. He had sourced the metal from old farm tools he scouted from antique shops, specifically because he wanted that grain.
Two months later, Wilson came across a book of saints for children, and read the story of St. Modestos. A widow whose oxen were dying came to him for advice, and he told her to take her iron farm tools, have a blacksmith forge them into a cross, anoint the animals, and they would be healed.
And that is when Wilson discovered that the woman who commissioned the cross wanted it specifically to strengthen her prayers for her son who was sick. Her son, who goes by the nickname “Ox.”
“I got chills,” Wilson said. “God is twisting my nose; I have to do something about this.”
So he began to attend his local Orthodox parish. Four years after he started forging crosses, he was received into the Church.
Art and the Incarnation
As an artist, Wilson delights in belonging to a faith that recognizes God working through physical things.
“It’s an obvious gift to me that the Word became flesh, that flesh is an image, an icon of God,” Wilson said.
“God created for us an image by which we can begin to see the invisible. First it was by word, and then it was by sight, and then it was in the Eucharist by a bodily union. In the age to come, who knows?” he said.
“I see unity with God as an ever-increasing thing. The distance is closing.”
One of his more striking pieces embodies this sensation of closing distance. It is a large piece, commissioned for a one-bed hospice for the homeless in Austin, and he designed it to hang at the end of a hallway between the bedrooms of a caregiver and the one who is dying.
The piece started out as a blank sheet of steel. Wilson used a Sharpie to sketch in the elements of the design, and then he began to hit the cold metal, over and over again.
“It was not lost on me that the icon of God is being manifest by literally a million repetitive hammer blows,” he said.
But it’s not a traditional crucifix. He didn’t want to confront the dying person with a harsh image of death.
“I wanted instead to make an image of transition,” he said.
His first sketches showed something ephemeral, which reminded him of water, which suggested baptism. As he formed the ripples around Christ’s head, he saw that they were a halo; and as the image continued to emerge, he realized that this is what happens to everyone.
“Our world reflects these spiritual realities. In participating in death, with water as a symbol of death, our halos are revealed,” he said.
The final design suggests crucifixion, but also rest. Christ’s arms are open, recalling his ascension, but also an aerial view of his baptism. And although his wounds are visible, they are empty, glorified, because he is risen. The human skull at the bottom of the frame is proportionately smaller than Christ’s head, because death is real, but not as real as life.
A lens to view life
Wilson’s sacred art is different from the art that adorns the walls of his church. The Orthodox tradition uses relief icons in metal, wood and stone, but not three-dimensional images, and he appreciates how that tradition works.
The slightly flattened figures of Byzantine iconography, in particular, are deliberately abstracted and not quite anatomically correct, to pull you out of your own here and now.
“It supersedes, or transcends, the tangible world,” he said.
Rather than trying to make the viewer feel like the image depicted is simply another object in our world, it says that the thing you see is here mystically, or liturgically.
“It helps me go to this mystical place where I can experience kairos,” he said.
This experience is what Fulton Sheen called “trans-historical,” and Wilson is grateful to be able to put his own artistic tastes and proclivities aside when he enters a church, and to exist entirely in a space of continuous tradition.
But his own work allows him to express other things, both spiritual and physical.
“It is kind of a form of creative destruction, or violent creation. It’s given me a lens to view my life,” he said.
