The garage behind Erica Moody’s sprawling farmhouse smells like hot metal.
Inside is a home workshop unlike most you’d find in the midcoast, complete with a forge where Moody makes her signature brass servingware and other fine metalwork.
On a recent afternoon, Moody’s summer assistant, Annalise Rubida, drilled spoon handles, carefully bending over a long table, her face set with concentration. Rows of serving spoons and forks were lined up on a long workbench, each piece etched with a hauntingly delicate pattern along the handle.
Moody’s Waldoboro workshop represents the latest and perhaps most personal chapter of a career in metal that started in 1994. Over the years, she has specialized in refined architectural and decorative metalwork, her expertise developed through decades of working alongside architects, designers, and homeowners in the Boston area. She has made everything from custom hinges and railings and furniture to a wind tunnel for a Harvard science lab, all requiring various techniques of welding, machining, forging, and finishing metal.
Moody’s road to becoming a renowned metal artist began many years ago in Saratoga, New York, watching her mother’s artistic journey as a printmaker.
“She would etch plates and print them, and then stitch and sew onto them. When I was 3 or 4, she began graduate school for her MFA and would take me with her to the classes she taught, testing out her lessons on me. I liked drawing, but I was more interested in doing hands-on mechanical things,” she said.
Not only did Moody prefer mechanical work; she didn’t want to dress for an office job, either.
“I think it was a very subconscious decision to get into metalworking,” she explained, “because I knew from a very young age, I didn’t want to get dressed up to go to work. One of my first jobs was working at an art gallery my mom ran in the ’80s, and we’d fight about what I was going to wear. I remember thinking: I hate this. I wanted to be known for what I could do, not for what I looked like.”
Moody went on to study fine art photography at Hampshire College, but in 1995 she took a break from her studies and moved to Boston, where she crossed paths with Pierre Tresfort, a high-end building tradesman and carpenter who was well known in the area for hand-carving circular wooden staircases, and for metalwork, too, who agreed to take her on as an apprentice.
“He had this beautiful workspace where he was restoring furniture and old wooden boats, and I liked the lifestyle he was creating for himself, restoring things, hand-carving wood, but also cultivating the traditional craft of high-end building trades,” Moody said. “I wanted to create a world like that for myself.”
Tresfort focused on custom commissions, crafting stainless-steel sculptures for artists, a room-sized wind tunnel to study how birds glide through the air, sculptural handrails for private residences, lighting for restaurants.
“It was an interesting way to learn the material,” she said, “because you were trying to figure out things that you would never have dreamt up yourself, pushing the boundaries of what the material could do, and figuring out how to get it to do things that weren’t really practical.”
In 2001, she set out on her own, continuing to take on challenging projects for private clients, mostly furniture and other architectural work. But it was teaching metalworking at the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin that led Moody to the midcoast.
“Around 25 years ago, I did a job in Waldoboro for some Boston architects designing a house in Dutch Neck, and loved the area, but didn’t really think about moving here at the time, though I always thought at the back of my mind that Maine would be somewhere I’d end up,” she said.
In 2014, Moody began thinking about leaving Boston for good, as the overhead of running the business was becoming exorbitant.
“I had three employees by then, and I was burning myself out doing huge jobs that had precarious financial margins,” she said.
Moody, who was married at the time, was also the caretaker for her then-husband, who was extremely ill.
“It was hard to juggle all the complicated responsibilities of the business, alongside the caretaking, so I thought moving to someplace more rural, shrinking the business down and owning my studio space might help things become more manageable,” she said.
Twelve years ago, Waldoboro was a quiet place, the downtown lined with lawyers’ offices. But that suited Moody just fine.
“Of course, it’s very different now, but at the time we didn’t mind that it didn’t have much going on. We had our own projects, like building a greenhouse and building the business,” she said. “The main thing for us was being able to have a studio and be able to be close to the ocean… The move really helped foster my own creativity, because I hadn’t designed or played in my own studio for the whole 15 years of my business.”
After a year in Waldoboro, Moody began creating her own line of servingware: spoons and forks made from brass and tin, ladles with delicate feathers etched on the metal handles, steak knives, and pairs of aluminum and ebony chopsticks.
“Everything is functional and meant to be used,” Moody explained, picking up a serving spoon, the brass glinting in the light. “The patterns on these are a newer technique I started last year called electro current, where I draw on the spoon with an oil pen and then etch it in ocean water that has electrical current running through it, which eats away the metal in places where the drawing is absent. A lot of the materials I use — brass, stainless steel, steel, wood, copper — are from the architectural building world. They’re also all very marine-related — I’ve done a lot of custom marine hardware for classic boats.”
Having the freedom to explore her creativity again here in Maine without the pressures and financial constraints of urban life is what has made this new direction in her work possible.
“What I love about living here is that you realize, pretty quickly, that people are doing their own thing in the woods in a passionate way, and they’re not having to scream at the top of a building about it,” she said. “They’re just really enjoying being able to do what they can do artistically. I love being part of a community like that. Midcoast Maine specifically is just a rich environment for people to cultivate their own passions.”
To that end, Moody is now also working toward creating an arts residency program on her Waldoboro property, which includes a cottage where her assistants live during the summertime.
“I’m working with a friend in Boston who’s a curator with Radcliffe and Harvard universities to develop an accessible retreat for artists to develop their creative endeavors and working with the Friendship school here in Waldoboro on potential studio space,” she said.
Moody wants to continue experimenting with new techniques for her servingware, where every piece is different, and she is also excited about the prospect of widening her scope.
“I’m looking forward to collaborations with other artists, maybe ceramicists, doing some porcelain and metal combos, or woodworkers, glass artists and other blacksmiths,” she said. “I’ve started to travel for work, both giving talks and teaching, being featured in exhibitions in Europe, just branching out and connecting with folks.”
Erica Moody’s work is available at Jesse Tobias in Camden, various tradeshows and craft fairs, and through ericamoody.com, where she also takes custom commissions for cabinet hardware. She contributes 5% of all her direct sales to a variety of nonprofit organizations championing social justice.
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.