Cal Lane: Metal Lace Artist

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I first came across Cal Lane's amazing 'rust dust' patterns at Scope Art Fair and most recently at the Museum of Arts & Design awe-inspiring 'Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting' show. Ms. Lane is an artist who hand-welds intricate and delicate patterns and filigrees into steel beams and surfaces. Her work exists at a fascinating intersection between craft, fine art and industrial production; and on another level as a historical confrontation with the feminine 'decorative arts' and the macho heroic-sculpture monuments of Modernism.

Quoted from Ray Cronin, Curator at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, from the catalogue of Lane's sculpture exhibition 'Fabricate':
"By cutting into the beams, reproducing the patterns of lace, Lane seems to be pointing out the limits of Modernity's asceticism. In this reading the lace patterns work as ornament, a decorative function that undermines the structural integrity of the beams...Is ornament eating away at the modernist purity of the towers? ...I suggest that the decorative is indeed a corrosive."