Forging a dialogue with metal: apprenticing as more-than-human collaboration

Metals play an important role in capitalist, colonial and ecological violence across our planet. Yet, despite increased academic interest in relationality and the more-than-human, our relationships to metals and minerals remain overlooked in cultural geographies. Using a practice-based research approach, I learned coppersmithing to explore copper through a more-than-human lens. The musing vignettes in this article are an attempt to articulate the non-verbal, sensory and embodied encounters with the human and non-human entities involved in coppersmithing, especially vessel raising. What came out of these encounters was, firstly, an extended sense of collaboration that moves beyond the human to recognise materials as collaborators and teachers and, secondly, an expanded understanding of apprenticeship beyond striving for ‘mastery’. This approach to craft encourages geographers and craftspeople alike to practice their own relational understanding of earthly materials.