Gabi Veit
Italian Metal Artist
“I HAVE BEEN WORKING FOR YEARS WITH ONE OF THE MOST ELEMENTARY CULTURAL OBJECTS IN THE WORLD: THE SPOON.”
What story does the spoon want to tell? This is the question that Gabi Veit asks as she crafts her metal spoons. The spoon has immense cultural significance – a tool used all over the world, a gesture towards the universal and the intimate. Veit started as a spoon collector before beginning to make them, describing how “my spoons are quotations, are approximations, are thoughts about the spoon.”
Veit’s making process extends this intimacy. Her favourite tool is her hands; her favourite material is wax, which allows her to model, to file, to drill, to shape. “At the work table, my hands set the rhythm, they knead and bulge, they combine elements and search for exciting surfaces”. She begins by forming dozens of spoon ‘bowls’ and then dozens of ‘stems’, considering how to pair them to reveal their personalities. Once joined, they sit for days “for observation” before being refined and sent to the caster. When her expressive pieces return in oxidised silver, the dark material reveals each spoon’s shadowy patterns and graphic lines.
“The spoon has a simple shape and basically consists of a line and a circle. But who says that a line can't be curved and a circle oval? Nature provides me with endless examples of variations.” Veit takes her cue from nature, finding endless wonder in the miracle of small things – a blossom that bursts out of the snow, a plant that defies wind and weather. She lives within a natural landscape, accompanied by the sound of the stream beneath her workshop and the family of trees in her garden, each of which she has named. Looking for new shapes in organic objects, whether leaves on a walk or a bouquet of gathered flowers, the forms take seed in her mind and intuitively grow from her hands in the workshop. Represented in her spoons is nature’s own variety, where every piece is astonishingly unique.
Studio photos by Dietlind Wolf & Christian Grund
