“Instinct is to move things with your hands and it takes a lot of remembering to practice using the tongs,” Hsu explains.

Hsu grew up around her parents’ jewelry studio, where they worked with cold metal. Occasionally, they would visit their blacksmith friend, Glen Horr, who made tools for metalsmiths. Hsu remembers visiting the studio inside a huge open farm in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia as a child. Her interest in blacksmithing sprung due to her attraction to the open forge.

“It was so different from the other art experiences that I’d had,” says Hsu. “It was dirty in a different way than painting, and painting can be really messy.” She still contacts Horr when she is having trouble with a technique. “Many skills are really difficult to teach; they involve a lot of muscle memory,” she says.

When Hsu moved to San Francisco seven years ago, she began looking for an interesting place to volunteer. When she walked into the Crucible, she knew she had found where she wanted to be. She spent her childhood around artists, so the place felt like a piece of home. She began volunteering in the office and eventually a spot opened up in the fire safety department, which she thought sounded cool. Hsu was able to trade her volunteer points for blacksmithing classes at the Crucible, where she learned various techniques.

Smaller and less confident than the burly bearded men usually associated with blacksmithing, Hsu first enrolled in a one-weekend women’s workshop, where she was able to gain confidence in the art. By enrolling in the women’s class, she was surrounded by women who were there to learn, instead of men who typically came to show off. There, she was able to submerge in an environment where it was okay to be unsure of herself. She compares this experience to her co-ed Blacksmithing II class where “elements of machismo” were clearly present.

“These guys had heavy hammers, five to six pounds and I’m over here with my two to three pound hammer,” she says about the innate sense of competition. “It’s a very different atmosphere to be in a class with twenty-something-year-old guys figuring out where they stand within the social continuum.”

Although female blacksmiths date back to the Iron Age, they are less frequently talked about, and not typically associated with the trade. In 1882, Hattie Graham became Sudbury, Massachusetts’ first female blacksmith against protests from men and women alike. She went on to advocate the right for women to vote and hold office along with the town’s male citizens. Today, the role of a blacksmith is still male-dominated, but women in the industrial arts are changing that.

Carla Hall, an instructor at the Crucible, created the Woman’s Blacksmithing class along with another female welder. The class was created to adhere to the demands of female students who wanted an environment that was more encouraging and less competitive than the co-ed classes. Their goal was to teach in an environment that was more welcoming for the woman interested in the industrial art classes. She recalls her own prejudices faced as a woman in an industry where her male counterparts lacked the be- lief that she was skilled to do physical labor.

Hall got involved at the Crucible during its founding years in 2000, and was drawn in by their philosophy to create an accessible community for the arts. Her involvement with blacksmithing developed from her attraction to fire and the ability to use it as an artistic tool.

Growing up in the humid climate of North Carolina, she developed a need for heat. Her first experience manipulating metal came in college where she observed its raw process. She was captivated by the organic textures created through blacksmithing, and knew she had found her passion. Hall’s business, Carla Hall Metal Design, revolves around a contemporary smith model where she merges skills including cold working, welding, woodworking, and cast iron.

Hall’s unique style is highly influenced by Japanese folk culture’s simple structure. Occasionally, she steps out of this realm to create out-of-this-world architectural objects. Her latest project is a whimsical, mechanical bird gate created for a resident in Napa. The project merged various mediums including blacksmithing, welding, cast iron, and redwood. It was designed in a steampunk fashion to reflect the client’s appreciation for bones and bugs.