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Maxie Cowen, Local Blacksmith
According to Maxie Cowen, the Halloween season doesn’t end on October 31st. “It’s a season for a reason,” she says. “It started with fall, and it’s going to end with fall.” There’s a grin on her face as she speaks, and it pulls longer on one side than the other, giving her a playful look.
Her clothes match her Halloween spirit; she’s wearing a checkered red and black shawl that hangs like a blanket over a black shirt and jeans. “The same shade of black,” Cowen points out, because anything else would ruin her outfit. The color scheme shows up in her hair and makeup too; for today, she’s chosen a true black lip, a foundation a few shades lighter than her already pale skintone, red eyeshadow swiped on both her upper and lower eyelids, and freshly dyed hair that is slightly lighter than the red on her shawl.
The finishing element of her outfit is blood vial earrings, either end of which are capped with intricate metal crowns and skulls. “The glass part’s not me,” she says as she leans forward, the right side of her head turned to me and her palm tipped up to form a table for the earring. While she didn’t make the vial itself, Cowen did make the metal portions of the earrings. “You’re not a good metalsmith until you’re good at the small things,” she says. “[And] I think I’m a pretty good metalsmith.”
Seven years ago, Cowen took her first metalsmithing class. What began as a way to occupy herself in her freshman year of high school became a weekly and then daily ritual. From there, it turned into a passion. “I was at a really bad place in my life and had the opportunity to take a class. It really saved my life.” That ‘bad place’ was a mixture of several things, including mounting academic pressure, uneasiness with the role gender expectations played in her life, and declining mental health. “Life’s weird, that young. I mean, it’s weird now and it’ll probably be weird forever. But it’s weird. That young.”
The danger of handling what was essentially lava combined with rigorously structured classes, most of which were taught by staid men twice her size, gave her the tools she needed to come to terms with the more tumultuous elements of her life. “It’s, like… everything is wrong. Right? So sometimes you need to be in a [place] where there’s safe danger. […] The kind of [danger] that you can play with without getting hurt.” Cowen reaches for a large ice coffee on the left side of the table, revealing small scars that run down her inner forearm, scattered width-wise in the telltale pattern of self-harm. It takes time to get to that, but when I do, she blinks and glances down like she’s seeing them for the first time.
“Yeah. It’s the same. Playing with fire. Cutting. You kind of…” She traces a finger under one of the longest scars, located a couple of inches from the crease of her elbow. “Kind of the same thing.” Cowen declines to say more, but she doesn’t need to; the information she has provided mirrors the way many self-harm victims discuss their injuries. Much of the time, the point is to manifest what they’re feeling on the outside – so that they can see it and acknowledge it instead of dealing with an abstract pain with no physical form.
Despite her reticence, Cowen doesn’t bother to rotate her arm to hide the healed marks. “Fourteen or fifteen year olds handling molten metal is a very bad idea,” she says in a nonchalant way that seems to refer to the cuts as much as it does the blacksmithing. “-but now I have some really cool stories. And, you know, I’m better. So that’s a plus.”
When she graduated high school, Cowen enrolled in Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where she concentrated in the jewelry, metal, and CAD/CAM major (computer-aided design & computer-aided manufacturing). Today, she’s a junior at the university. “It’s a lot,” she notes with a slight frown. “School culture is rough.”
Cowen’s academic and financial responsibilities have made it necessary to split herself between personal projects and pieces for other people. Her own tend to be cosplay or mood pieces – alongside the blood vial earrings, she’s made a metal beard designed to fit her face, a large axe, and many of the practical pieces in her apartment. Generally, what she makes for other people tends to be stranger. “I’ve had people want me to, like… replicate their fingers for a necklace?” she says with an upturned and fully amused lilt. “And horns. Actually, someone wanted a pair of dick-mushroom earrings once. They drew what they wanted it to look like, so I gave them dickshroom earrings. Didn’t get any complaints.”
As Temple’s “local blacksmith,” a title that she is incredibly proud of, Cowen is well known on campus. “I usually have people just stop me in the hall and ask for stuff. There are a lot of repeat customers.” At craft shows, she consistently sells general purpose and artisanal pieces. Likewise, her Instagram messages are full of commission requests. The novelty of her art means that most people are happy to pay for it because it comes with the bonus of being able to say “they know a real life blacksmith.”
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when she isn’t frustrated by customers. “I think all artists are undervalued,” she says as she fingers the bracelet on her wrist. “Someone asked if I could make them a whole ass sword and got mad when I said it was a couple hundred dollars.” The quoted price – $230 in total – was on the low side given the price of materials, the skill necessary to make something so large, and the amount of time it would take. Cowen shakes her head and leans back, her arms crossed over her chest. “Some people just… ugh,” she mutters.
The way Cowen talks about her work is completely different from the way she speaks about customers. Of the metal butterfly wing she was working on most recently, Cowen says, “Kind of simple. One sheet, but it split. [I was] tired, and the metal felt it. […] I truly believe that as an artist, you put a bit of yourself into every piece you make. So if you’re burnt out, the piece you make won’t be as successful. The same thing is true vice versa. […] And, anyway, you learn from the bad [pieces] too. Bad, good. All lessons.”
Like most of her pieces, there was a rustic flair to the butterfly prior to its splitting. Circling the edges were curdled, dull orange bumps that could pass as aged rust instead of an intentional effect. The rough finish extended inward toward the remainder of the metal, which was just beginning to develop the aged look that Cowen is known for. “It’s really funny. There’s this shelf in my bathroom that kind of looks like it came from a junkyard? All of my friends talk about it. They love it because it’s new and it looks so, so old.” The old-new look is Maxie’s specialty – a finish she developed after deciding that she didn’t like the perfect look of many newer pieces.
“I think [polished pieces are] amazing, and I respect the people who do that, but it’s… people look at it and think it’s from a machine, but I want people to look at my stuff and know it’s not.” She blinks and then laughs, the sound sharp at the beginning and low on the remaining tolls. “[People] usually just think [my work is] an old manufactured thing, so I don’t know how well that works for me.”
As Cowen flicks through her gallery to show me pictures and videos of the pieces she loves most, a smile remains on her face. Sometimes it grows when there’s a grand story attached to the fabrication, and other times, it remains slight and nearly disbelieving. Mostly, she looks at her work the same way that parents look at their children – as if she can’t believe she’s capable of creating something so beautiful. She pauses on an image of the metal beard she made and circles her hovering finger over it.
“I think I figured out I was non-binary because of my classes,” she says. By non-binary, Cowen means that she isn’t exclusively male or female; her gender exists outside of the gender binary. “Outside [of the blacksmithing classes], everyone was treating me like a girl, and […] it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I was like… why?” Whenever she was forced to perform gender, Cowen balked, saying that she didn’t feel like she belonged where other people thought she did. Spaces for women felt wrong, but so did spaces for men, and any effort to align herself with either men or women ended with more frustration. “I was trying on all these different identities, you know? Trying to figure me out,” she says.
Cowen was in the middle of trying to figure it all out when she began blacksmithing, and the class opened a lot of doors for her. Being surrounded by men who didn’t treat her like a child (or a “fragile, female baby”) gave her an opportunity to start thinking about how she wanted the rest of the world to regard her. In the end, Cowen decided that it was all up in the air. She wasn’t quite a woman or a man, and while it made fitting into most spaces harder, it also made being herself easier. She calls it a “trade-off” – people continue to treat her like a woman despite her efforts, but ultimately, she feels more comfortable in her own skin and mind.
Of her pronouns, which she specifically said were she/her when I asked at the beginning of our meeting, Cowen shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been feeling lately. They’re just ways to refer to myself. Who cares, right?”
The beard that sparked the conversation is one expression of Cowen’s gender, and she often finds herself wearing it on days when she wants to perform masculinity. It is a part of herself that she can take on and off at will, Cowen says. A way to perform her gender without any permanence. “I’m thinking of making mutton chops next. Like… big. [Burly]. And a chest plate with chiseled hair.” Every piece she shows me after the beard is a costume piece for an original character designed to fit in a steampunk universe. In that world, just like in this one, Cowen is a blacksmith. There, though, she is able to customize her body however she wants. Her gender expression is fungible, and by swapping body parts whenever she wants, she can satisfy herself in a way that she can’t in this world.
Referring to the metal jaw, Cowern says, “[Sometimes] I feel really me when it’s on.” She also feels really her when it’s off. In a roundabout way, blacksmithing has helped her mold herself by giving her the tools to understand and express herself.
#
Compared to the quiet, balanced atmosphere of the café where I first met Cowen, the studio feels chaotic. Dry heat from the forge rolls into the air, singeing the inside of my nostrils and sucking all of the moisture out of my eyes almost as soon as I’m inside of the room, and a layer of sweat covers every inch of my exposed skin. In front of the forge itself is Cowen, who draws out a piece of glowing metal and transfers it to a table to begin pounding it into a stake. A steady flush washes over her cheek, and although it’s a result of the heat, it looks like a byproduct of excitement.
She’s started a piece that she says will be a brooch when she’s done, but there’s no way she can finish it today. She does, however, have the time to make a sketch, pound a shape, and talk me through the process of making pieces. “I always forget people don’t know what I’m talking about when I tell them what I’m doing,” she says after giving me a detailed explanation full of words that I’m unfamiliar with, including fullering, cold shut, and ingot. “I start going off about things I think are cool, and everyone is like ‘huh’?” Cowen pounds a hammer onto the end of a tiny rod with an ease that makes it seem like the tool is guiding her instead of the other way around. Every time she picks up a new tool, it comes across that way.
That doesn’t mean that Cowen is incompetent or incapable of controlling the tools; instead, I get the impression that she’s making a conscious decision to trust the tools, metal, and fire to work together to create something beautiful with as little intrusion from her as possible. Not once does she speak to any of the items she touches, but every gesture she makes suggests that she’s in conversation with them and thanking them every step of the way for their work.
“Reverence?” Cowen glances over during a break that seems to be for my benefit instead of hers. “I guess there’s reverence. It’s not a religion or anything, but it’s like… you respect things that should be respected, right? Bears, cars, whatever. You have to, or you get hurt.” She flicks her attention to another blacksmith in the studio, who is holding the edge of a sheet of metal to a grinder. Sparks come away from it, showering his heavy apron and covered arms in an offshoot of metal scraps. “There’s a little reverence, yeah.”
“She can be that way with all of her work,” says Mallory Weston, a professor at the Tyler School of Art. “So much of what we teach the students is that pieces are alive and should be treated that way. [Cowen] understands that.” Weston has a tendency to focus on the duality of concepts and material – how what a piece means can be mirrored or challenged by the material that it’s made out of. Some of her jewelry, for example, molds to the shape of the wearer’s body while having an otherwise solid appearance. She’s interested in highlighting and breaking boundaries, and she encourages her students to be as focused on how pieces exist in the world and how they can challenge what is known about the world.
“[Cowen] is serious about [her work], all the time. It’s all personal. She guides these pieces through this process of making themselves, but it’s obviously not all them. It’s her too.” Weston says, giving Cowen the credit that she doesn’t give herself unless she’s joking. Why she’s so hesitant to acknowledge that her pieces are successful because of her isn’t clear, and she shrugs when asked directly.
Despite how somber Cowen can be when discussing metalwork, she still mostly behaves like an excited child when she isn’t actively manipulating a piece. Metal hammered to the perfect thickness is met with a subtle, congratulatory fist pump. When a colleague welds a lock into place, she forgets her work and steps back to watch him. And at the end of the day, when she’s done working and we’re sitting beside the cache of her finished pieces, she reaches out to walk her fingers down each item in a playful manner. There is as much levity as there is gravity in her treatment of everything she does, and regardless of her current tone, she always seems happy.
“This is a short day,” Cowen says despite the fact that I’ve just watched her work for four hours. “I’m [in the studio] easily 12 hours a day, even on weekends. […] It’s a lot.” From an outside perspective, it’s more than ‘a lot’. The studio is uncomfortable to sit in for long periods of time, and although it gets easier to ignore the body’s pleas to step into a cooler, more tolerable environment, the constant presence of sweat and the feeling of microscopic particles sinking into the skin and lungs makes it impossible to completely put out of mind. For blacksmiths, any work requires lugging around heavy tools, testing the limits of fire and sharp blades, and performing the same taxing movements over and over. All of that in the hopes of coming out with a piece that’ll work when there’s always a chance that it won’t.
“What did you say earlier?” Cowen murmurs with a small frown. “Labor of love? It’s that. Heavy on the labor.”
We end the day there, though she sends me progress pictures as she shapes the brooch. Over the course of two more days, she finishes the piece, and when she’s done, I get a series of victory emojis followed by two sleepy emojis to indicate that she’s going to pass out soon. I think back to one of the comments Cowen made during our first conversation. “Working with metal is really therapeutic,” she said. “It fixes everything. Or… not everything. Most things.” Even as it drains and taxes her, metalsmithing acts as the healthiest vehicle Cowen has for understanding and making sense of both herself and the world.