IRON MAIDEN FORGE

Ellen Durkan is a 5’5 female artist-blacksmith artist from Wilmington, DE who forges fashion. Through her brand Iron Maiden Forge, Durkan is the first artist-blacksmith to create a space for high-fashion metal creations that are specifically designed to be worn. Not only is she breaking boundaries artistically, but questions about gender and conformity are front and center in her designs: forcing the world of artist-blacksmiths to reconsider how this age-old craft can be envisioned in the twenty-first century.

Photo: Ric Frane

Born and raised in Wilmington Delaware, Durkan is the oldest of nine siblings, all of who were home-schooled early on. As a child, she was fascinated by sculpture and form through ceramics and also by creating figurative illustrations: two processes that would inevitably allow her to imagine forging metal as a fashion statement. 

During her college years, Durkan would continue to pursue her artistic impulses, but only on the side as she couldn’t quite make the connection of how to financially sustain a career as an artist. When she entered graduate school however to get her degree in sculpture, she was introduced to forging. She got the opportunity to work as a blacksmith apprentice and was instantly hooked. Her passion, skill, and growing notoriety for her aesthetic  gave her the confidence to fulfill her artistic passions as an artist-blacksmith full-time. In her short tenure, Durkan’s designs have appeared in notable gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, and in 2016 she accomplished her dream of using her brand to put together the first ever “Forged Fashion” runway show – a 10-year effort in the making.

Durkan states that she designs and crafts “with the female body in mind, ” and what she could envision herself wearing. She oversees the entire design and craft process which often begins with a life size illustration of her design, forging metal pieces, incorporating fitting and sizing for the models who will wear her creations. These drawings drive the forging process, as she continually returns to them to amend or enhance throughout the process, incorporating fitting and sizing for the models who will wear her creations: all until she feels she has the desired outcome.

PHOTO CREDIT: JOE HODDINOTT

Ellen Durkan: Illustration

PHOTO CREDIT: PAIGE RAMSEY

Durkan states how the pieces she creates can feel “emotionally empty when just made for display, but when people put the pieces on the dynamic shifts, and there is a sense of power that takes place.” Her designs consist of various metals such as iron, copper, and steel that she combines with other textiles such as leather and lace to create caged dresses, corsets, bustiers, as well as adornments such as cuffs, collars, necklaces, earrings, shoes, and hair accessories. The influences that drive her designs bear the traits of romanticism and the gothic sublime that meet head on with the unconventional and extraordinary of avant-garde design. She is not one however who likes to be categorized, and claims to have a host of influences that range from individual artists and designers to wallpaper designs. Her creations move from metal art to forged fashion as an embodied experience. Her forged fashion is raw and evocative and intended to be performative and visceral, which is why her art perhaps is so radical to some in the blacksmith world.