Bolt Poetry: A Blacksmith’s Mini Sculptures Of Bolts Bent In Human Positions

Julia Horeftari for Art-Sheep

All images courtesy of Tobbe Malm

 

Greetings, my brave reader.

Oslo-based Swede blacksmith, artist and photographer Tobbe Malm is here to share a story about bolts. Or, rather, he is here to help the bolts tell their story to the world. “The bolts reminded me of human forms, and I felt they had something to tell” Malm explains. He said that he found the bolts in an old farm’s barn, in an area called Bergsladen in Sweden. Through heating, forging, bending and twisting them, the blacksmith created relations, meetings and situations out of which “suddenly stories emerged about sorrow, joy, pain, warmth and humour”. He felt that there was a kind of poetry being developed, so the title “Bolt Poetry” was given to the project appropriately. But the pieces themselves come with no title. The reason for this is that Malm wants to let the viewer decide on his or her own.

Malm will soon start to work on Serie III because he doesn’t think he can find more old bolts like these, because they seem to be rare nowadays. “The bolt people are few in numbers and maybe these are the last ones, but those that exist will remain to tell their stories”.
If you would like to see more work from this really cool artist, my brave reader, you can check out his website. He’s got some quite interesting things going on.