The Industrial Art of Welding

The emergence of welding caters to the need for new technological methods in the development of metal art.
Art creation and craftsmanship methods are always inseparable. As an industrial technology, the emergence of welding caters to the need for new technological means in the development of metal art. On the other hand, the unique and wonderful changes produced by metal under the action of welding heat also meet the demand of metal art for new artistic expression languages. In today's metal art creation, welding is being emphasized as a unique artistic expression language. Metal welding art can be separated from traditional metal art in a branching manner as a relatively independent art form, because welding has artistic qualities.
Welding can generate rich artistic expression language. Welding is usually carried out at high temperatures, and metals undergo many wonderful and rich changes at high temperatures. The metal base material will undergo color changes and thermal deformation (i.e. welding heat affected zone); After the welding wire melts, it will form some beautiful textures; And welding defects are often applied in welding art. Welding defects refer to the defects that occur in the welding joint during the welding process and do not meet the design or process requirements. Its main manifestations include welding cracks, porosity, undercutting, incomplete penetration, incomplete fusion, slag inclusion, weld bead, collapse, pits, burn through, inclusions, etc. This is a very interesting phenomenon: in today's metal art creation, the artistic quality of welding is usually reflected in some failed industrial welding operations, or hidden in some welding defects that industrial welding tries to avoid. Secondly, the language of welding art is unique.
A welded sculpture has rough welds exposed on the surface, and various irregular cutting marks have become the artist's beautiful artistic language. In many cases, due to the rough and rustic style pursued by welded sculptures, the corrosion and defects of the metal are often deliberately preserved according to the needs of the work. Therefore, in welded sculptures, a non carved and primitive beauty can often be felt.
The weld seam at the steel plate joint in the lower part of the sculpture is very thick. From the perspective of the firmness of the welding process, this is obviously not only due to considerations of the solidity of the sculpture. In this sculpture, the twisted weld seams in the lower part have become an important factor in the overall aesthetic of the sculpture and an indispensable part of it. From the overall perspective of the sculpture, whether it is the text design in the upper part or the texture treatment in the lower part, there are twisted welding marks everywhere, and the entire work achieves a unified visual language. The method of manual plasma cutting utilizes the heat generated by the current during cutting to create a heat affected zone at the cutting edge, thus "dyeing" the bright white stainless steel with a slightly gradient color. At the same time, by adjusting the welding specifications, the strong airflow sprayed by the cutting gun will "blow" a randomly formed texture around the cutting edge at the moment when the steel plate melts. The formation process of this random effect has a certain degree of randomness, but it is also an inevitable phenomenon under certain welding specifications. From a size perspective, larger welding art wall decorations can be welded using semi-automatic CO2 gas shielded welding, while smaller ones can be welded using manual tungsten inert gas welding.
If a wall decoration work is regarded as a painting, the processing of points, lines, surfaces, black, white, gray, and even colors in the picture can be achieved through welding. Various types and materials of metal wires, using different welding processes, will appear in different forms on the screen. Different metals have different colors, such as stainless steel's bright silver, aluminum's sub silver, carbon steel's jet black, titanium steel, bronze, purple copper, brass, and as for steel, different steels will undergo different color changes when heated at high temperatures, that is, different welding heat affected zones. In addition, cutting is also one of the methods for creating welding art wall decorations, which can be combined with welding or used alone, depending entirely on the creator's creative intention and mastery of the process and effect. The richness of the changes can be imagined when these methods are combined.