An Interview with Elizabeth Brim

This interview was conducted by Julie Umberger

Images by Travis Dodd, via The Bo Bartlett Center

At the heart of every blacksmith’s studio is a powerful act of transformation. Steel enters the forge rigid and unyielding. Under fire, hammer, and vision, it becomes something entirely new.

For artist Elizabeth Brim, that transformation has defined a remarkable career. A celebrated blacksmith and sculptor, Brim is known for work that stretches the boundaries of traditional metalwork while honoring the deep history of the craft. She's also one of the first and most impactful female blacksmiths of our time.

In a recent interview with Julie Umberger of The Bo Bartlett Center, Brim shares insights into her creative process, her journey into the world of blacksmithing, and what continues to inspire her work at the anvil.

Read on to learn more about the life and work of Brim, and make plans to celebrate the exhibition at the Public Reception on from March 26th, 6-8PM. In addition to the reception, at 7:30PM, there will also be a screening of Iron Pearls, directed by E. Vincent Martinez, a retrospective film of the artist.

*This interview is shared in partnership with The Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University.

[Julie Umberger sitting in Elizabeth Brim’s living room filled with antique furniture, family

photographs, Elizabeth’s sculptures, tea and cookies. Accompanied by Stewart the cat.]

Julie: You’re going to be returning to Columbus. It was Columbus College at that time. Tell

me a bit more about teaching there.

Elizabeth: I had so much fun. I didn’t get paid much, but I had so much fun. I was part-time,

but I spent all my time there. I would stay late in the evenings and make stuff, in room 222.

Jamie Howard is the one who hired me to teach there. In fact, he told me when I finished at

the University of Georgia, “Now we’re gonna need a ceramics teacher. You should go to the

Penland School of Craft and learn how to make ceramics.” So that’s what I did. I came here

in the spring of 1980, took an eight-week class, and they gave me the job.

J: How long did you teach?

E: Thirteen years! I would teach at Columbus College in the fall and winter. In the spring

and summer, I would be at Penland.

J: Tell me about the art scene in Columbus at the time.

E: I remember growing up in Columbus, going to the museum and taking classes there,

going to the library. I love the library. I had to go to charm school. We did ballroom dancing,

and we also took art classes. There was a lady named Ruth Davis. She was a really neat

lady, and we did oil painting with her.

J: Why do you think Penland has such a rich creative craft culture?

E: People come here to take one thing. And that’s all they do while they’re here. They go

and eat, they come back to the studio. They’re with the same small group of people all the

time. It’s a real bonding thing. Immersive learning is what they preach about.

J: Why did you move from Columbus to Penland permanently?

E: Because I loved it here. I saw this house with a for sale sign on it, so I went into the post

office. A woman named Fran worked there, and I asked about the house. She said, “Oh,

that’s already sold. Somebody’s got a contract on it.”

Then I ran into True Kelly, who lived in the area and already owned three houses around

here. I asked if she’d bought it. She said, “No. Why, are you interested?” I said yeah, and she

said, “There are too many men down there. I’m gonna put out my vibes.”

And she did—chanting and everything. Then she came up to the iron studio and said,

“Elizabeth, that under-contract sign is gone. Call first thing tomorrow morning.” So I did,

and I got the key.

Penland is the best thing that ever happened to me. I told my parents I wanted to get

divorced, and my father said, “Thank God.” I was just a poor little artist, but I was frugal as

hell.

J: What does this house represent?

E: This house represents the fact that I can take care of myself. I remember when I paid my

first electricity bill—I was so proud.

At first, I didn’t really want to leave Columbus. I wanted to be what I’d imagined myself to

be growing up: the wife who was taken care of, revered by her husband, respected by the

community. That’s what I wanted.

When I moved up here, this place was a shack. But I’ve made it better. And I made it better

myself.

J: You’re affecting a lot of women. Who are your female icons or role models?

E: My mother’s probably the biggest one. Somebody who comes to mind is Baby Jane

Hudson—Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

I look up to Vivian Beer. She’s very articulate, very skilled, and very dedicated. She’s a

metalworker, and she’s also a hell of a lot of fun.

I look up to a lot of my contemporaries. Cynthia Bringle is someone I admire. She came here

in the sixties to teach the very first eight-week concentration program in clay, and she’s

been here ever since. She’s 86 years old and still cranking out her work.

J: Is that going to be you?

E: I’ve already slowed down. But it’s because I got sidetracked with my house during the

pandemic. Also, I had to make money making my artwork. Not to say that I wasn’t

passionate about what I wanted to be doing, but I had to pay bills. I frequently thought,

“What if they were paying me enough at Penland that I didn’t have to make my work?” I

think I still would have made it.

J: Did having to hustle bother you?

E: I found it rewarding. I really like the fact that people wanted to have the stuff that I

made. I’ve been very proud of what I’ve done. Ever since those first days, those first times

when I went to the competition in Madison, GA and got so much attention for making those

high-heeled shoes. When I started making those damned pillows [laughs], everybody was

paying so much attention to me. I thought, “I gotta be good, because I don’t want all these

really great blacksmiths to look at my work and say, ‘Yeah, she’s all about hype. It’s just her

big hair ribbons and her pearls and that southern accent.’”

J: You talk about the Artist Blacksmith Association of North America (ABANA) conference

and how few females there were amongst all these men in overalls. Had you ever done

anything like this before?

E: No. I had confidence, but mostly I had passion.

J: Where did the passion come from?

E: Blacksmithing is what I thought was the coolest thing in the world. And that old Penland

studio—nobody cared about it but me. I wanted it to be better, and I wanted to do

everything I could to make it better. And it is.

J: You have made so much feminine imagery. Do you have a bigger message?

E: I’m making fun of myself. I’ve got a picture in my memory. It’s me and my sister and my

mother. She made all of our dresses, and we’re getting ready for Easter Sunday. We had on

our little patent leather Mary-Jane shoes with our little socks with the ruffles on them and

our gloves. We’ve got flower bands on our hair, and we’re going to church. That’s what I

was expected to do. That’s why mother said she did not approve of me taking

blacksmithing—I was supposed to be ladylike, and that was not ladylike. So I’m kind of

making fun of being ladylike, but also making a world that I want to live in. Like with those

ruffled tuffets and the hat and stuff, making me appreciate heirloom stuff, the grandma

stuff. I’m making my grandma world to live in.

J: Has it circled back to where you actually love those things, not just the expectation to love

them?

E: Yeah, I think so. That’s an interesting question. Like the tutu—it is kind of making fun of

this little southern girl who had to take dancing lessons. But at the same time, I’m really

proud of that tutu. I’m really proud of the skill that I used to make it. I guess I’m just

entertaining myself.

J: Do you feel like the masculine versus feminine dynamic is still relevant in blacksmithing

today?

E: That’s a hard question. There are way more women now. I think it’s always still a

conversation, but things have changed.

I want to tell you a story. It was a Saturday and there was nobody around the Penland iron

studio, and there’s this young woman sitting there. I said, “Hey, what’s going on?” She said,

“Oh, I’m gonna be the studio assistant for this coming class. I hear Elizabeth Brim lives

around here. I really hope I get to meet her.” And I said, “That’s me!” That really made me

feel good. Apparently, she’d never seen a picture of me. It was before I cut my hair, too.

J: Did you feel rebellious cutting off that long braid?

E: No! I felt like I was losing something. I felt like that ponytail was my identity, and my big

ribbon. But it was just depressing me too bad to braid it and think, “God, it’s so thin, it’s so

wimpy.” And I thought, it’s got to go. And I was excited to see what it would look like.

J: Do you feel differently about your hair now?

E: I do. I think it looks better than it did. When I was in Italy, when I did my presentation,

they asked the question about wearing the pearls and stuff. It just mellifluously flowed out

of my mouth about being ladylike and demure, and how now these days, people aspire to

be nasty women, badass blacksmith bitches!J: Do you think the boys are jealous now? That the boy blacksmiths wish they could be nasty, badass bitches?

E: They have been jealous ever since we first started. When I first started blacksmithing,

there were a lot of women getting attention for being blacksmiths. I know it helped my

career. And people would say, “You know, you’re getting all the attention. If you’re a man,

you don’t get any attention.”

J: You invented techniques in blacksmithing. Tell me about that.

E: Well, I did not invent that technique. We thought it up together. But it was already

happening in industry, and other people had thought about it at the same time for art stuff.

I wanted to be a good blacksmith because people were paying attention to me. So I thought,

“I’ve got to really work hard and earn people’s attention.”

I said I wanted to make a pillow. And we—Dan Rabin and David Seacrest—were talking

about different ways you could make one. You could form two halves and put them

together. Then we said, “What if we just weld two pieces of sheet together, heat it up, and

push compressed air in there and see what happens?” I have a picture of me and David and

Dan holding this thing, the first one, and it worked so well.

J: You felt like people were paying attention to you because you were a female blacksmith

before you were a good blacksmith?

E: Yes. Because of those shoes that I took to the ABANA conference—they were so different

than everyone else’s there. And they were paying attention to me, and I was kind of a freak.

I had this big bow and curls and my southern accent. I thought, “I’ve got to be credible.”

I worked really hard to learn how to make the scrolls and collars, to put things together and

all these traditional blacksmith things. I wanted to learn these traditional techniques—to

have them under my belt so that when people looked at my work, they would go, “Oh, but

she does know what she’s doing.”

J: What mostly inspires you?

E: Seeing things and saying, “I think I can forge this.”

All those camisoles were inspired by one morning I woke up thinking I had to make

something for the Penland auction, and I saw the coat hanger sticking out of the closet. I

thought, “I think I could forge that.” Then I thought, “What am I gonna hang on it?” And then

I thought of the camisole.

J: Why a camisole?

E: Because it’s a pretty, girly thing. The first camisole that I made, it was all beat up and had

the fringe on it. I was so proud I couldn’t stand it. I titled it Flirt. It was in the auction that

year, and it was so great. We’re all sitting there, and when Flirt came out to be auctioned

off, the whole tent started buzzing. I was so excited.

J: Does that keep you going? That buzz of excitement?E: People liking what I made? Yeah! It gets me really excited having stuff in the Penland auction. Some people go and hide when their piece is being auctioned off. They just can’t deal with it. But I just love it.

J: I love that you’re unapologetic about it.

E: In my speech at the Outstanding Artist Educator thing, I said that my father always

thought we needed to have a man to take care of us. When I sold my very first pair of high -

heeled shoes and an apron that I had made, I was able to buy myself a four -wheel drive

truck. I thought maybe he’d think I’d be okay.

J: It seems like you were brought up on very traditional values, but you kicked against that.

How did that happen?

E: I think I was just lucky. The universe just dropped this house in my lap. I’ve always kind

of led a charmed life. Jamie Howard says, “Go to Penland and learn how to do ceramics, and

you can be our professor”—that was lucky. That doesn’t happen to everybody. There were

so many serious ceramic artists who were pissed because I had gotten that job, even

though it didn’t pay hardly anything. But it did give me an identity in Columbus. I was THE

ceramics teacher at the Art Department. And I needed that.

J: Do you love surprising people with what you do and who you are?

E: Yeah, I really enjoyed having people be surprised when I was telling them that I was a

blacksmith, especially if I was dressed up in my church dress.

J: Do you still like dressing up?

E: I don’t dress up in a church dress that much anymore, but I do like dressing up.

Somebody actually said to me in the lunch line up at Penland, “Are you for real with your

pearls and ribbons and stuff?” I said, “Hell yeah, I’m for real.”

J: You say you do this as making fun, but this is now your identity.

E: I really am. I remember when I first started wearing the pearls in that old blacksmith

shop—that was a nasty place, filthy just walking in there.

J: Did you start with actual pearls? Were they cheap, or Mama’s pearls walking into the

blacksmith shop?

E: I won those pearls. I still have them. I won them at a sporting goods shop. They were real

pearls. They were teeny weeny little pearls. On the radio they were saying, “Come on over

here and sign up. We’re going to give away a string of pearls.” I said, “What the hell?!” They

called and said I’d won the pearls.

When my friend Tom said, “Just wear a string of pearls to be ladylike,” I had them.

J: Is legacy important to you?

E: Yeah, I don’t want to be forgotten.

J: If people are going to remember you, what do you want your legacy to be?

E: I guess I just want them to think I was a good person and a good blacksmith. And this

show is going to help a lot. And this catalogue is going to be really important.

J: The Elizabeth that’s outside of the studio—what’s your fun?

E: I listen to books a lot. I really like Charles Dickens and the Victorian stuff. I think that’s

why I like this antique-ish kind of furniture. I just pretty much like hanging out with my

friends. It’s my favorite. Listen to Tupac, talk a lot, cook out, watch horror movies, and just

chatter. When people ask me what my job at Penland School is these days, I say I’m the self-

appointed social director and archivist of the iron studio.

J: How long were you the iron coordinator?

E: Six years.

J: And the social coordinator?

E: Forever. Infinity!

J: Thank you for sharing. I know you’re not just a blacksmith, but being a blacksmith is such

a large part of who you are.

E: Yeah, it’s a huge part of my identity. It’s what I want to be. There are a bunch of people

today that don’t want to be called blacksmiths.

J: Why is that?

E: When you say you’re a blacksmith, immediately what pops into your brain is a big old,

burly man with a long beard and gnarly hands.

J: What do they want to be called?

E: Sculptors. I call myself a sculptor sometimes. A lot of people call themselves a

metalsmith. I call myself an artist blacksmith.

J: What do you hope people say about you?

E: That I’m a badass blacksmith. ◼️

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