Reprinted from Style At Home • November/December 1997 • By Pamela Young
Long before written language existed, humans told stories with symbols. A drawing of a deer commemorated a successful hunt. A spiral meant water And a handprint was the earliest way of saying, “I was here.”
Today, thousands of years after the first rock carvings and rock paintings were made, Vancouver artist Mollie Massie uses ancient imagery to tell her clients’ life histories in steel. One recent commission for a fireplace-screen depicts a couple, their three children and things the family loves about Vancouver, including the goats at the zoo and whales. “There’s a spiral for water because it rains a lot in Vancouver,” Massie says, “but there are also suns because they’d had a wonderful, sunny life.” A Virginia-born MBA graduate with a background in art history, Massie was running a home-renovation business in Denver, Colo., when a chance encounter redirected her career. Through friends she met sculptor Fred Myers, who used ancient imagery in his work. Fascinated by the variety and vitality of these symbols, she apprenticed with him for two years. After Myers’s death, Massie moved to Vancouver with her husband and their two young sons. Her firm’s name, Myers Massie Studio, honours her mentor’s memory.

Massie begins each project by drawing a design on paper. After redrawing it onto a sheet of weathering steel, which is suitable for indoor or outdoor use, she cuts out the shapes with an oxyacetylene torch. Her objects range from gates and staircase railings to drawer pulls and chandeliers. “I say to my clients, ‘The sky’s the limit. If you can think of it, I can probably create it for you”; however, Massie’s fireplace screens are arguably her most magical creations - with firelight flickering behind them, these figures from an unimaginably distant time seem to come alive and dance.