Trench Art Art

That's not a typo. I am interested in making art from Trench Art.

Here are some examples of Trench Art:

They look a little...dusty, a little clay-y because I have made molds from casts from them that I then use to make steins and mugs.

What is Trench art?

It is art made by a serviceman while he was neither shelling, nor being shelled. He would take the discarded casings and pound designs into them, choosing to make something beautiful while sitting in the trenches of brutality--a man sent to war, battling with and among armaments, but also battling with the heart of a creator.

Trench art made its way back to the States, carried by survivors, but not kept in the families these soldiers came home to, or made upon their return. I often wonder at this: How is it that these objects could have come to be mine?

Here is a stein I've collaborated with that soldier of long ago:

A clearer shot of the poppy:

They say that so much blood was spilled on the fields of Argonne that the soil, to this day, tests positive for human DNA. But it won’t always do so. This art—this evidence of a will to create--is going to last longer than the evidence of a will to destroy. Something about that soldier’s work cries out to us from the past into our future: Battle on.

Cheers to Handmade,

Amy Ponce!