Metalwork Artist Gillian Christy

Branches (2023), 19″H x 18″W x 8″D, stainless steel.

Fence Roadway (2021), 9’H x 8.5’W x 5.4’D, stainless steel.

Stamp with Wings (2024), 2.5″H x 2″W x 2″D, bronze.

The Beginning (2024), 3.75″H x 2.5″W x 2″D, bronze.

Artist Gillian Christy.

Knotted Branch (2023), 20.25″H x 15″W x 9″D, stainless steel.

Rockabye (2019), 48″H x 29″W x 8″D, steel, paint, bronze, styrene, and white-gold leaf.

Winged Victory (2018), 9.16’H x 3’W x 5.33’D, stainless steel.

Goodnight, Sweetheart (2018), 36″H x 22.25″W x 7.5″D, steel, paint, bronze, and gold leaf

Growth (2024), 2.5″H x 5″W x 6″D, bronze.

About a year out of art school in her home state of Iowa, Gillian Christy, who had never seen the East Coast before, decided to move to Providence. A metal sculptor interested in big public works, she had read about WaterFire, the Convergence International Arts Festival, and the thriving art scene there, so she packed up her Ford Aerostar van and a trailer of metalworking equipment. “Shouldn’t you at least see it first?” her parents asked, but she told them, “I’ll be fine.”

She was. After two years of grinding away at stainless steel at The Steel Yard, a maker space for metalworkers and other artists, she won a big public commission, turning a broken-off smokestack in Providence into a beautiful crowned column twined with ivy. This led to more commissions, big and small, public and private, and a move to Boston.

It was the pandemic, though, that really helped her home in on the things she loved. Christy, her husband, and her son (“who was doing kindergarten on Zoom,” she says with a laugh) left the right angles of the city for a fixer-upper weekend house on a lake in the western mountains of Maine, where she could endlessly watch the wind play over the expanses of iris and lily plants in the water outside. On frequent hikes, she loved examining strangely bent branches, mushrooms, and the forest floor.

Christy had often included leaves, grasses, and other icons of nature in her work, but she tended to enclose them in something architectural, like a small house or frame. Now she focused on just nature.

Stainless steel, which comes in big flat sheets, rods, and bars, lends itself more to boxy shapes, so to make organic forms like seagrass and kelp, she casts details like buds or fronds in bronze, which she incorporates into the steel. The result is something quite miraculous: hard, strong, impervious steel, seemingly floating or bending in the wind.

“I want to celebrate nature’s forms,” Christy says. “I’m capturing a moment in time, taking a deep breath, and saying, ‘that’s pretty amazing.’ ”

EDITOR’S NOTE: To see more of Gillian Christy’s work, visit gillianchristy.com