Bergen, Norway
Sunniva Aldous
Twelve Kettles
Sunniva forged and finished twelve copper kettles, each shaped from a different stage of her own learning.
I threw the first two kettles away, and I’m glad I kept the log of why.
Sunniva Aldous
The summer
Sunniva Aldous had worked in silver for years and had never forged anything larger than a spoon. A secondhand anvil, bought the winter before, had sat unused in her workshop in Bergen, and she wanted a project big enough to make her use it.
She made one kettle a week for the first six weeks and threw away the first two. She kept a written log of what went wrong with each: a seam that opened under heat, a belly that sagged, a lid that never quite sat. By the fourth kettle the entries had shrunk from a page to a line.
In the second half she slowed down, spending a full week on a single spout. Her mentor, a retired coppersmith, visited twice and corrected her grip on the hammer. He did not say much. On the second visit he picked up her seventh kettle, turned it over, and asked why she had hidden the join under the handle.
The answer, she admitted, was that she had been embarrassed by it. She reworked the join in the open for the eighth kettle and left it visible on the rest. Each of the twelve is shaped from something she had only just learnt, so they run from stiff and careful to loose and sure.
The twelve kettles stand in a row on a shelf in her workshop, and anyone who visits can pick one up. Photographs of each, with her log entries beside them, are on the fellows page. The two she threw away are still in the corner, flattened.
