Heavy Metal in Gowanus

This month the Bell House hosts a Heavy Metal event that's more metal than music. 

For the first time since opening in 2008, the Seventh Street music venue and mess hall-style pub doubles as a gallery, with four steel sculptures inconspicuously scattered in the barn-like hall.

The bar-cum-art space is welcoming Park Slope sculptress Martha Walker's esoterica (think Tim Burton meets Giacometti), which she forges out of molten steel in her studio across Seventh Street in Gowanus.   The fact that the Bell House functions primarily as a bar informed the curatorial process: the pieces are placed in corners and on a wooden beam overhead, well out of range of stumbling partiers.  If you don't know they're there, you likely won't even notice them.

It's equally likely, however, that you've seen Walker's work elsewhere: on "Gossip Girl", in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, or on the Pratt Institute campus.  Her pieces will figure prominently in "The Art of Love", a movie due out next year in which Olympia Dukakis plays a sculptress whose works are actually Walker's.

Now 57, Walker graduated from Pratt Institute in 1976, but drifted from her fine arts pursuits to begin a career as a commodities trader before founding her own telemarketing firm.  Eight years ago, she picked back up.

"I knew I didn't want to live in an environment that was under financial stress because of my work," she said, "so my decision was to put it aside and have a professional career and hopefully get back to making artwork in the future, once my finances were in order."   

Asked about the vexed relationship between art and commerce, Walker admitted that she's tempted to cater her work to what people might like.  "It's always nice to be successful and make sales," she said. Though she consciously fights the urge to indulge collectors' tastes, she can't promise that her aesthetic doesn't bend to the will of the market, if only subconsciously. 

Even if Walker does defer to her collectors' preferences, who can blame her? Her drip method is hypnotic to watch and makes use of the interplay between heat and gravity, but it's meticulous and tests the artist's patience.  Each sculpture takes two or three hundred hours to construct.  She creates a skeleton of her forms using metal rods then drips melted steel--which resembles molten lava--onto the skeleton.  

"The drip methodology serves to reveal the process," she said, "I don't want to hide the manner in which I create my pieces, in fact, I want to celebrate it."

Walker's oeuvre toggles between figurative and abstract, evoking all manner of creatures and forms, from sub-aquatic beings to ectoplasmic silhouettes, exotic animalia and anything in between.  Walker is never want for ideas.  "I was making artwork all the time in my head while I was pursing my other professions," she said, "so the ideas are backed up." 

Walker lists Rodin, Bernini, Michelangelo and John Pey, a South Korean welder and personal mentor at Pratt, among her influences.  One piece—a dinosaur looking creature with gnarled limbs—is equal measures Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice. 

Asked about the parallel, she conceded that it's calculated: "I love Tim Burton.  I love his monsters.  One day, I thought, 'I'm going to make a couple little monsters myself'."