Folklife in the Panhandle

SANDPOINT — During a hazy, drab weekend, one room in Sandpoint shone with heritage and craftsmanship. 

On Nov. 9 and 10, Pend Oreille Arts Council invited community members to view Between Borders — a folk art exhibit celebrating ordinary items made extraordinary. 

"They're pieces that were created for practical reasons that turned into this art form that's passed down through generations,” Claire Christy, POAC arts coordinator, said of folk art. “It's important to highlight them and bring awareness, because it helps preserve the techniques.” 

Between Borders was assembled by Idaho Commission on the Arts and includes ornate saddles, handmade guitars, ornamental duck decoys and other works by Idaho artists and craftsmen. The exhibit landed at the University of Idaho’s Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center recently as part of a tour of North Idaho and Eastern Washington. 

During the open house, several artists featured in the collection showed up in person — including blacksmith William Branson, who forged steel art on the campus throughout the weekend. 

“When the steel gets up to that nice red color, it almost acts like clay,” Branson said as he pounded the glowing end of a steel bar on an anvil. 

“A lot of blacksmiths, when they have a concept and they want to work it out first, they'll get to hammering some clay, and they'll work it out that way first,” said Branson. 

Branson has smithed as a hobby for more than a decade. Three years ago, he became certified as an instructor and now teaches classes five days a week at his business, Athol Ironworks. 

Participants in his courses are as young as 8 and as old as 74: a grandmother who takes lessons at the shop. “I helped her forge a baby gate for her second floor for her grandkids,” Branson said. 

Branson prefers to repurpose disused items for his projects. At his booth, he showed off a hatchet forged from an old hammer and a pair of herb choppers made from a vehicle spring. 

His works on display in the exhibit include a forged portrait of slender bird stepping through a marsh and a steel hummingbird probing the splayed leaves of a metal flower. 

While many of the collection’s contributors may have acquired their craft from a parent or a mentor, others — like chip carver Ed Ronningen — just stumbled upon it. 

“I retired, and my wife said, ‘You're not just going to park on a couch. You're going to get a hobby,’” Ronningen said. 

That decree led Ronningen, a Coeur d’Alene resident, to a woodworking shop in Spokane. There, his wife handed him an introductory chip carving book and sparked a 10-year journey of self-instruction. 

To carve intricate repeating patterns into boxes, signs and ornaments, Ronningen creates a template and uses a sharp blade to painstakingly hollow each shape in the pattern. 

For a small sign the size of a cribbage board, “you're looking at the better part of a week” of 6-hour days, Ronningen said. 

“It keeps me out of my wife's hair,” he said with a laugh. 

After its stint in Sandpoint expires, the exhibit will hibernate for the winter before traveling to Coeur d’Alene in March for an extended stay at the Museum of North Idaho. 

According to Christy, Idaho Commission on the Arts curators are hoping to continue expanding the collection. That way, the exhibit will evolve, becoming an even more comprehensive capsule of traditional life, craft and art in the Idaho Panhandle.

    Montana-born artist Carol Uptagrafft contributed several works of rosemaling — a traditional Scandanavian painting style — to the exhibit.