by Megan Auman
June 29, 2021
Of all the ways to make a bowl, raising might be the slowest. It is deliberate, drawn-out, and occasionally frustrating. It is also incredibly fun, once you get the hang of it.
What is raising? Taking a flat sheet of metal – typically copper, brass, bronze, or silver – though other metals will work as well – and through a series of strategic and successive hammer blows, moving the metal upwards into a vessel. It is called raising to differentiate it from sinking. In sinking, metal is hammered into a depressed surface – a carved tree stump, a sand bag, even a hole dug in the earth – from the inside. But in raising, the metal is worked over a form – usually of steel, wood, or plastic – by hammering on the outside.
Most raised bowls start with sinking, but I try to get to the raising part as quickly as possible. The reason is right there in the name – who wants to sink when you can rise?
Vessels throughout history have been made using this method – goblets, pitchers, teapots, and my personal favorite, silver mugs where the bottom is an intricately worked animal – a stag or a bull – and which, when full of wine, would be impossible to set down without spilling. I imagine ancient Hittites wandering the Fertile Crescent, playing what is essentially a fancy game of Edward Fortyhands with ornate, animal-shaped chalices. All sorts of fantastical objects can be created by raising, but the most basic form is a bowl, and that’s what I’ve been making.
Raising is slow because the metal does not like to be moved all at once. Each successive round of hammering can only bring the metal up and in a bit at a time, otherwise it will stress and eventually crack. It turns out metal is not unlike people in that way. Because it can be hard to see the progress, I often mark each of these rounds by tracing a circle around the mouth of the bowl on a sheet of paper. Repeated after each round of raising, I’m left with a record that resembles tree rings.
There is more to raising that reminds me of tree rings and the marking of time. To keep track of where my hammer should fall, I draw concentric circles on the bowl itself, spaced half an inch or so apart. Starting towards the center of the bowl, each line is hammered into place before moving on to the next. Despite drawing the lines with a Sharpie, they aren’t permanent. But, and maybe it’s my love of all things striped, I like seeing them there, and sometimes wish they would remain.
The more you hammer, the less malleable the metal becomes, otherwise known as work hardening. It is amazing how quickly the metal goes from supple and pliable to suddenly resistant to any further attempts to make it move. So between each round of hammering, the metal must be annealed. Taking a torch, the metal is heated to a specific temperature, just shy of red hot, and then cooled quickly-ish (too quickly and it will crack) in air or water, which makes it soft and workable again.
Unlike forging steel, raising copper is a process done cold. The metal retains its fluidity after cooling, until the next round of hammer blows renders it unworkable again. I recently found a partially formed bowl, from when I was first learning to raise, in a box in my garage. I had annealed the bowl before getting distracted and putting it away, and the metal was as soft as if I’d heated it moments ago, just ready and waiting for the next round of hammering. And so the process is repeated – heat, cool, hammer – lines marked on metal and paper to chart the progress – until reaching the desired shape.
Depending on the thickness of the metal, this process can take hours, days, or even weeks and months. My friend Corey makes bowl faster than anyone else I know. We were in graduate school together, and she would disappear into the raising room – yes, there is such a place, because raising is painfully loud and needs to be kept separate from other communal workspaces – and emerge a few hours later with a finished bowl. I always marveled at the results, so different from the arduous process I knew raising to be. Still, a few hours to make a small bowl is slow, in the grand scheme of things.
There must be something about this slow, deliberate process that encourages us to contemplate time. For her undergraduate thesis, Corey made a series of 22 bowls, one for each year of her life up to that point. Moving metal as marking time.
I learned to raise from Corey’s now husband, Nathan. Nathan and I started graduate school at the same time – he the technical metalsmith with a mastery of metal I couldn’t comprehend, and me, the weird girl, sewing flowers from balloons and stitching them onto forms to create brooches and bracelets and other wearable sculpture that most people would hesitate to call jewelry.
I should have learned to raise in undergrad, but stubborn pride got in my way. After one lame attempt at raising a bowl, I abandoned the process. My nineteen year old self didn’t have the patience, and I found a loophole in the assignment. Rather than making the sphere of the “Sphere, Cylinder, Cone” project out of a sheet of metal, I opted instead to weave a wire basket – creating something more akin to a bird’s nest than a bowl. Begrudgingly, my professor had to accept that I had fulfilled the criteria, but in the future, she was more specific that the assignment required raising in order to get a passing grade.
In graduate school, I decided my inability to raise a bowl amounted to some sort of metalsmith’s moral failing, and asked Nathen to teach me. Corey would only join the program the following year, or I would have asked her, and I probably would have learned her magic tricks for raising faster. But I wanted to learn, and how was I to know that someone with Corey’s prowess would join our program the next year? Under Nathan’s tutelage, I learned just enough to make a passable vessel, and then tucked the skill in my back pocket for a rainy day.
That day came sooner than expected, as upon arriving at my first university teaching job, I was tasked with teaching an advanced metalsmithing class. And a funny thing happened on the way to that class – in making samples, I fell in love with raising. While raising has never been the core of my studio practice, I pull it out in times of transition or to fill a void. After a morning spent teaching a summer jewelry course for non-art majors, I would head out to a hot yoga class before returning to the studio where I taught to make bowls. In the weeks after my mother’s death, I purchased the tools to raise in my home studio, and hammered through my grief. In the hopefully waning days of the pandemic, as I struggled to figure out what life would look like next, I took hammer to metal and made bowls. And when my brain needs a break from writing these words, I will head into my studio and pound away.
Even as my skills have grown, raising a bowl is still a painfully slow process, made more slow the larger the bowl you are trying to make. A bowl made from a twelve inch disc will take nearly four times as long as a bowl made from a six inch circle, not just double the time as it would be easy to assume. That’s geometry for you – a twelve inch circle has over four times the surface area of a six inch circle – which means four times the surface on which to hammer.
It’s no wonder then that industry looked to move away from raising as a manufacturing process as soon as possible. Hand formed teapots and bovine wine vessels may have been good enough for Paul Revere and the Mesopotamians, but they took far too long for modern capitalism. Spinning, stamping, and pressing, which require much less time and human intervention, quickly replaced raising as the way to make a form out of metal.
My grandfather was a machinist, and one of the few things I inherited from him was his press. Standing over six feet tall – and taking up a large corner of the garage – with a hydraulic jack mounted in the middle, I could make bowls faster if I wanted to. But efficiency is not the point.
As the processes changed, so too the materials. Copper and silver gave way to aluminum and stainless steel. This makes sense. Silver is expensive, and prone to cracking during the raising process if not treated gently – gently being a relative term for a process involving heat and hammers – and copper, well what do you do with a copper bowl?
I type this very phrase into Google, wondering what to do with the products of my labor – these copper bowls that are accumulating in my studio.
It turns out that without a coat of tin on the inside to make them food safe, copper bowls aren’t good for much of anything – save for one exception. Copper is the material of choice for making meringue. A chemical reaction occurs between the surface of the copper bowl and the egg whites as they are being whisked, making the soft, fluffy peaks that are the envy of everyone who watches The Great British Bake-off. (To be honest, I’ve never really watched the show, so I’m only assuming that at some point they try and make meringue.)
Still, raising is an excruciatingly slow process just to make a bowl that you can only use for one very specific task in your kitchen. Yes, bowls made of copper, or brass or bronze or silver, for that matter, can also be decorative. But there’s a part of my brain – the part shaped by nearly forty years of living in a capitalist society – that struggles with the idea that something that takes this long should have some kind of purpose.
Or perhaps, the process is purpose enough. Perhaps the slow hammering from flat sheet to vessel is the point – a repudiation of our industrial, capitalist world that says that work must be constantly done faster, faster, faster.
A growing trend has emerged around this rejection of fast – we have slow food, slow fashion, slow journalism, so why not slow bowls? At the same time, our slow cookers have been replaced by Instapots, so maybe the world isn’t ready for slow bowls. Maybe we are all spinning too fast to appreciate the aesthetic and tactile qualities of a bowl made slowly. Maybe those hours I spent not just hammering, but caressing the surface of each bowl, looking for irregularities and perfecting the form, will be appreciated by no one but me.
And maybe that is enough.
The capitol A art world tells us that art must be appreciated by others – ideally many others – to be valid. The single aesthetic experience of one person – unless that person has a lot of money – matters very little. But there is value in slowly creating that aesthetic experience for yourself. In taking the time to learn the curves of a bowl, to trace its surfaces with your fingers and its mouth on your paper, as it comes to life before your eyes and under your hammer.
Time spent raising never feels like time wasted. Instead, it is time marked, literally, in hammer blows and Sharpie lines. The human equivalent of rings in a tree.