Kirsten Skiles
De Soto, Wisconsin
 

Kirsten Skiles is an artist blacksmith who creates hand-forged ironwork for commercial and residential clients.

“I am trying to bring a reverent sense of nature, a sacred sense of nature,” she says of her work, adding that she includes the rugged elements of nature in her art.

She works with architects and designers on nature-themed custom pieces, including railings, decorative fireplace screens, hardware and relief wall pieces. Using the ancient techniques of chasing and repousse’ she shapes sheet metal into high- or low-relief images. She also makes branch and leaf drawer pulls in bronze and iron.
 

Among her recently completed commissions is a pair of copper bas-relief panels for West Salem Planning and Molding, and a variety of intriguing jewelry pieces for individual customers.  Her hand-forged leaves are especially popular at art fairs as well as with her online customers.  She sells her smaller pieces and negotiates most commissions through her online store.

An anthropology major in college, Skiles took blacksmithing classes in her senior year and in them found her real love.  A 1990 graduate of the University of Illinois, she began metal smithing, studied at the Penland School of Crafts in Ashville, North Carolina, and in 1995 earned a masters degree in metals and jewelry from San Diego State University.

The following year she married Bill Fiorini, an art professor at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse who is also an artist in jewelry and metal smithing. They eventually moved to a small acreage outside of DeSoto, Wisconsin, where they built first a soaring barn-style workshop and then a sunny, friendly home. Her office is in an airy loft overlooking the main floor.

Skiles’ work has been shown nationally and abroad, including at the Touchstone Center for Crafts in Farmington, Pennsylvania; the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, Tennessee; the Monroe, Wisconsin, Art Center’s Frehner Art Gallery; and the Healing Arts Program, a collaboration between the Hudson Hospital and the Phipps Center for the Arts.

In addition, she regularly gives workshops in chasing and repousse and in summer 2008 will be giving workshops in Maine, Minnesota and New Jersey.

Kirsten is also teaching herself to spin and is creating interesting ornaments and wearable art, several inspired by requests from her children, ages 5 and 8.

A visit to her very inviting Web site, http://kaskiles.com, which is updated regularly, reveals the crocheted and needlefelted items she has made recently.  It also offers scenes from her workshop, commentary on how she conceptualizes and then produces her work, and insights into her life as artist, mother and homemaker.

Her online shop can be found at http://knitsteel.com.