Corpus No. 1

My name is Joel Hegge and I am an artist working in Denver Colorado. My formal education in the visual arts took place at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. While there Iearned a BFA in Studio Arts with a focus on painting and sculpture. In the mid 1990’s I began to make sculpture using the direct metal method. The sculptural work I produced at that time was made using the standard metal fabrication methods such as cutting, drilling, bending, grinding and welding. I also began to explore the use of forging equipment and techniques. The difference between these two approaches is that the forging process is mostly about “moving material” and the fabrication approach is essentially about “cutting and pasting” material. My piece, Corpus No. 1, was made using a self-contained electropneumatic forging hammer. In the making of the piece, I was exploring the use of tooling made specifically for isolating a mass of material from a section of iron bar so that this section can be transformed dimensionally while leaving the body of the original bar dimensionally unchanged. The hammer, with the proper use of the tooling, is designed to move the hot material in certain ways and the resulting form comes from understanding how to move the material within those constraints and possibilities. Corpus No. 1 is 1of a group of 3 pieces made using this approach.