Material Alchemy

How three artists transform street guns and military uniforms into regenerative craft—and help others in the process.

By Kimberly Coburn
June 1, 2022

Summer 2022

Features + Profiles

Free To Read

Photo by James O. Brenner

James Brenner pouring molten iron into an open-faced mold.

Alongside the East River in New York, a bronze statue hoists his hammer, frozen at the height of his swing. His muscular body torques like an anxious spring, his toes grip the platform for purchase, and his left hand seizes the hilt of a sword that ends not in a sharp point but a wide tongue of metal.

The nine-foot behemoth was sculpted by Soviet artist Yevgeny Vuchetich and offered to the United Nations in 1959 by Nikita Khrushchev as a gesture of peace. Its title—Let Us Beat Our Swords into Plowshares—is taken from the biblical prophecies of Isaiah and Micah that a day of peace will come when people “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Hammering a sword into a plow blade does more than turn one tool into another; it revolutionizes a way of thinking. Through casting guns into sculpture, dissolving them into ink, or breaking down military uniforms into paper, artists are opening avenues of transformation through their practice and transmuting tools of violence into regenerative craft. The techniques they use in service of this vision are varied, and the process often proves as revelatory as the completed work.

Melt Our Guns into Shovels

For James Brenner, converting guns into shovels isn’t just a symbol of peace—it’s an opportunity for community. A large-scale metal sculptor based in Minneapolis, he discovered metal casting’s capacity for collaborative engagement early in his career. “Casting iron as a practice is something you can’t do alone,” he says. “You need a group. And the way people gravitate toward the big fire, it’s almost primal.” He quickly found that the pours themselves offered as much meaning as the objects he cast: “The process itself is the product.”

One of Brenner’s community collaborations took place in 2018 at the King Center in Atlanta during the 50th anniversary commemoration of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Working with Oakland,  California–based artist collective Lead to Life, and following in the lineage of Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, Brenner melted guns from a San Francisco city buy-back program into shovel handles and plaques (it’s illegal to reuse decommissioned guns in Georgia). King’s youngest daughter, Rev. Bernice King, delivered the first gun to the furnace for melting. The plaques created that day—as well as shovels topped with handles Brenner had poured and finished off-site in advance of the event—were used in ceremonial tree plantings at historical sites of violence in and around Atlanta.

Brenner readily admits the challenges inherent in casting as an immersive experience. First, most decommissioned guns are cut into unrecognizable pieces, so Brenner has to reassemble them enough for the public to read them as a symbol. He also discovered that putting guns directly into the furnace obscures the visual experience of their breakdown, so he built an addition atop his furnace to allow onlookers to witness the process of disintegration from above.

In the furnace, everything not made of ferrous metal blows apart or dissolves in spark and flame, contributing to the spectacle and leaving only the metal pieces to drop into the fiery heart of the cupola. Iron melts easily at the 3000 degree temperatures reached by the furnace, but steel does not. So, Brenner had to add chips of iron from old radiators to supplement the molten iron ladled into the open-face plaque molds. “I think if you were to calculate a percentage of how much gun metal is in the iron, it’d be pretty low,” he says. “But symbolically, it’s still there.”

jamesbrenner.com | leadtolife.org | @lead2life

Photo by James O. Brenner

James Brenner places a gun over his iron furnace to begin the process of melting it.

Photos by James O. Brenner

At an event by Lead to Life, an organization that partners with artist James Brenner to melt guns into shovel handles, a mother affected by gun violence offers up a gun to be transformed.
Finished handles—made from melted-down guns and cast iron by James Brenner and the Lead to Life artist collective—waiting for their shovels.

Dissolve Our Arms into Ink

Thomas Little of Clinton, North Carolina, is an ink maker who uses the ink he’s created in his own drawings. He also sells them under the moniker A Rural Pen. He started making inks in 2012, after deciding to revisit a childhood interest in ink making first kindled when he wrote a school report on magician and escape artist Harry Houdini. One of Houdini’s early tricks involved “turning water into wine” using the same iron and tannin chemistry used in ink production. Eager to dive back into the alchemical world of ink, Little needed a source of iron, and his father—a part-time gunsmith—had pieces of old gun barrels lying around his workshop.

Here’s Little’s process. To dissolve guns, made of ferrous metal, he places them in a mix of sulfuric acid and water, which leads to the creation of blue-green crystals of iron sulfate, known to ancient alchemists as green vitriol. These crystals form the prima materia Little uses to create the pigments for his inks. Next he adds tannins to the crystals, resulting in the black iron gall ink used in manuscripts for thousands of years; when heated, the mixture drives off the sulfuric acid and oxidizes the iron into a bold red. These two colors are known in the art world as Mars Black and Mars Red, for iron’s association with the Roman god of war. One weapon goes a long way; Little calculated that the barrel of one rifle creates 11 gallons of ink and fills 482 inkwells—enough to pen over 12,000 copies of the King James Bible.

Little’s practice became a way of healing from the impact of his own experiences: “I’ve lost some friends to gun violence and always thought about how to remediate that loss and heal those wounds,” he says. “I looked to the principles of homeopathic medicine, the idea that the cause of the illness is incorporated into the cure.”

Little eventually started buying guns from local pawn shops to remove them from circulation. When asked if drawing with ink that was once a gun impacts his art, Little explains that he does his best to forget the ink’s origin. “I like the idea that the gun has lost its power. A condemnation of memory. I want to make it fade quietly into colors.”

@a.rural.pen

Photo by Thomas Little

Iron oxide pigment being washed from 45-caliber revolver.

Photos by Thomas Little

Iron sulfate crystals, the first stage in ink making, form on the gun.
Red iron oxide pigment in a flask.
Drawing with a William Blake quote, made by Little in red and black iron oxide.

Liberate Our Uniforms into Paper

Upon returning home from active duty in the Iraq War, Drew Cameron divided his days among school, papermaking, and involvement with the veterans’ peace movement. “I had this huge need to fill a void,” says the paper artist, who lives in Iowa City, Iowa. “I didn’t know exactly what it was, but when I found paper, it just clicked.” Cameron realized the plant fibers in his own combat uniform and their encoded stories could be made into paper on which new stories could be written.

Soon he began traveling the country offering Combat Paper workshops. “In shorthand, Combat Paper is making uniforms into paper,” he explains. “People immediately want to know why, and I think the most expedient way to understand it is that a creative practice, an art practice, can help people come home.” Cameron has conducted Combat Paper workshops all over the country with veterans and civilians of all ages, and he has seen even a single workshop deeply impact participants. “The most moving thing is how, in just going through a workshop, I’ve witnessed people’s lives take a different direction,” Cameron reflects.

Together, participants “liberate the rag” of each uniform by stripping it of buttons, Velcro, clasps, and seams, then tear the fiber into strips and small squares. “For a lot of people that’s enough. It’s a big step,” he says. Other folks continue on to clean and pulp the fabric into fibers that swell in size in the circulating water of a Hollander beater. A Vietnam-era uniform breaks down into enough pulp to create nearly 40 sheets of paper. More modern uniforms aren’t completely made of natural fiber like the earlier ones, so additional cotton rag must be added for the paper to have structural integrity.

Next, the fibers are sieved from the water using a screened frame called a mould on which an empty frame called a deckle rests. The deckle creates the paper’s clean edges. Finally, any remaining moisture is pressed from the cellulose fibers that have chemically bonded to one another. “Then,” Cameron adds, “once it’s dry, it’s paper—this amazing substrate we’ve been using almost 2,500 years. A tested technology.”

While the uniforms Cameron works with have stories written within their warp and weft, the paper created in workshops offers an invitation to create something new. Cameron appreciates the sense of freedom that transformation generates. “Let’s make our own paper,” he proclaims. “Let’s write our own books. Let’s host readings. Let’s make prints. There was just this potential again that started to reveal itself.”

combatpaper.org | @combatpaper

Kimberly Coburn is an Atlanta-based writer and self-professed amateur and dilettante. Her work explores the intersection of craft, the human spirit, and the natural world.

Photo courtesy of Combat Paper

Uniforms being deconstructed in a workshop at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.

Photo courtesy of Combat Paper

Sheets of paper and the military uniform type OG-107 they were made from.
Photo by Eric Perez

A pile of cut-apart uniforms in Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal’s installation Conflict Exchange at the first Triennial and Veteran Art Summit in Chicago in 2019, organized by the Veteran Art Movement group. Paper from the uniforms was featured in the show, and Cameron ran papermaking workshops during its run.
Photo courtesy of Combat Paper

She Is Carrying Empty Cardboard Boxes, a pigmented pulp print by Drew Cameron on paper made from uniforms in the Combat Paper project.

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