Benjamin Kjellman-Chapin

Somatisms

The project Somatisms: Corporeal Idioms Translated offers a series of visual translations of
English language idioms based on the human body into the vernacular of my particular
dialect of forged steel. Each hammer blow plays the same role the word does in written and
spoken language—both are the building blocks with which we deliver meaning in a finished
work.
Just like the process of writing drafts of texts, where sentences will be struck from a
paragraph, or words swapped out in favor of other more succinct building blocks, many
hammer blows will never be seen in the end—their marks will be obliterated by planishing
blows, or maybe they were rough forging blows whose marks were always intended to wash
away through further forging, like waves lapping over footprints in the sand in the tidal line
on a beach. The unseen-in-the-end strikes of the hammer are used to hew the rough meaning
out, never intended to be present in the final finished iteration.
In spite of their inevitable intended erasure, each and every hammer blow serves a specific
and distinct purpose. The textures, surfaces, creases, dents, and divots that are chosen to be
visible in the final composition become the translation we read in the end.
Likewise, just as idioms are the most vivid and colorful aspect of language and carriers of
meaning, the aspect that gives language its allure, and reflects the collective culture of the
people fluent in it, the malleability of steel and the resulting forms and textures that appear
when leveraging its plasticity is and are what gives steel its most vibrant ability to carry
within it the richness of meaning.