Leszek Sikon: Selected. Transition Exhibition
Published on 24.03.16
Leszek Sikon is another current student that has been selected to exhibit at the forthcoming Transition Exhibition as part of the Ypres 2016 Event to be held this autumn in Ypres, Belgium. In this blog we celebrate Leszek’s success and find out more about the tools that intends to design and make the next three months
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Leszek Sikon is another current student that has been selected to exhibit at the forthcoming Transition Exhibition as part of the Ypres 2016 Event to be held this autumn in Ypres, Belgium. In this blog we celebrate Leszek’s success and find out more about the tools that intends to design and make the next three months for the exhibition. Leszek is currently studying on the second year of our BA(Hons) Artist Blacksmithing Programme and comes originally from Poland.
Here he explains some of the ideas and inspiration behind his proposal :
“I am going to make a series of tools made from an original munitions from the time of the conflict. I came up with this idea during my summer holiday, I had a pleasure to work with an 85 year old master blacksmiths Jozef Wozniak. He told me many stories about the time after the second world war, when due to lack of resources many blacksmiths, were forced to use scrap found on battlefield to make tools.
I have looked further into the subject and found out that many of the munitions and other equipment used during first and world war used made from steel confiscated by government, tools, iron gates even church bells which some of them were over 300 years old were confiscated, in the case of Church bells there are stories of clergy and parishioners conducting ‘requiem’ masses as the bells were removed for the war effort, a kind of farewell to an old friend .
After the war those battlefields were littered with explosives and it took years to clean up and even now we are still finding shells from the time of first world war. I am truly excited about this project by making tools made from munitions I would be reversing this process and again give them back their ‘original’ form I would change the tool of destruction back to a tools of creation, the type of tools that I would be making, will be decided after I secure the material since ammunitions came in many shapes and sizes”.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this body of work develops and they’ll be more blog posts to follow ..
