We are delighted to have the work of artist and Smithworks employee Adelaide Ruff on view for our first show at Friday the gallery. Adelaide graduated with an art degree from Bard College in 2015, where she focused on paper making, ceramics, metals, and mixed media. Adelaide has been able to use the tooling and knowledge available at Smithworks to continue developing her skills in metal fabrication. This body of work builds on Adelaide’s foundation in art making with her more recent blacksmithing experience to showcase a variety of techniques for sculpting with metal.

Put a Pin in It engages us in a world of dichotomies with playful melancholy. As you enter the gallery space, the Resurrection Lilies pop out from the middle of the room and create a flow to view the art. You are guided first to a handmade paper brick wall held up by safety pins that feel anything but safe as they pierce the wall behind the delicate brick facade. The sense of questionable security follows you around to Tragedy/Comedy Bouquet, where copper repoussé faces loom with flowers of growth and decay. The faces are hinged as a suggestion of choice perhaps, an idea echoed in the scale of the sewing materials seen throughout the show that feel both creative and destructive in nature. The contradictions continue as you move around to view a set of wings draping off an oversized sewing needle, suggesting the idea that domesticity has the potential to be as much a tool as it is a trap. Similarly, the delicate webs of soldered wire discerningly placed throughout the architecture play with the themes of confinement and survival, and provide a sense of fragility and impermanence that represents the inevitable natural cycles of life. Put a Pin in It scrutinizes sensations of temporality and loss and the endearing yet often futile attempt to hold onto things as they are.

You can see more of Adelaide’s work here.

Adelaide Ruff at Friday

Work Shop Stories About

Adelaide Ruff at Friday

making a meat hook

Work Shop Stories About