If Martha’s Vineyard had an animal mascot, it might be the horseshoe crab. Walking on a beach in Aquinnah, who hasn’t picked up the shell of one of these odd, armored, prehistoric creatures of the sea and brought it home? The sandy, brownish hue of the horseshoe crab can’t compete with the colorful shells of scallops or mussels, but its weirdness is undeniably appealing, from the pointy protrusions on top, to the long, spiky tail, to all those little legs clustered underneath.

Metal sculptor Marla Stelk, who works in a Vineyard Haven studio, makes horseshoe-crab sculptures out of annealed copper and brass. While the real crab is not something most people would consider beautiful, these sculpted versions are exquisite. Stelk created her first set of three – ranging from five inches to thirteen inches long – for a client who commissioned them after admiring her work at the Vineyard Artisans Fair in West Tisbury.

“I’d been wanting to make one for a while,” Stelk says, “because horseshoe crabs are armored – they look as though they should be made out of sheet metal. Also, I have a fascination with ancient history and creatures, and these go back to the dinosaurs.”

Actually, horseshoe crabs are believed to have predated the dinosaurs by 100 million years. And they’re not even real crabs. More closely related
to the scorpion and the tick, the horseshoe crab has two sets of eyes, can survive without food for a year, and  swims upside down. Such a unique animal deserves to be honored in art.

Stelk, who apprenticed with the late Island sculptor Travis Tuck before starting her own business in 2001, makes a range of decorative and functional items, including garden sculptures, hanging ornaments, tables, wall art, weather vanes, mirrors, candle holders, hooks, and even stove hoods and counter tops. But this year, horseshoe crabs are among her most popular pieces. After making and selling her first set of three, she borrowed them from the new owner, displayed them at the artisans fair a second time, and orders came pouring in.

To make one of the crabs – all of which, created by hand, are slightly different from one another and signed by the artist – Stelk begins with real horseshoe-crab models. She creates paper cutouts corresponding to the various parts of the shell, using them like sewing patterns to fashion equally sized pieces of copper sheeting. Next, she uses an oxygen and acetylene torch with brazing tips to anneal the copper pieces – heating them until they’re red-hot and letting them cool. Stelk says that brazing – that is to say, welding at a very high temperature – makes the work stronger than if it were soldered at lower temperatures. Once the metal cools, it is softer and more pliable than before being annealed.

“I think heating expands the molecules,” she says, “and hammering the metal compresses them again.”

Using rubber-tipped hammers, Stelk holds the copper pieces against a block of wood and hammers them into shape, bending the metal with her hands as well as the hammer. She welds the various hammered pieces together, and then begins the detail work. Using a chisel and a process called repoussé, she makes two rows of small, indented lines, like hyphens, corresponding to those found on the animal’s shell. To create the border around the base of the shell and the knobby points on top, she uses a phosphorous-copper brazing rod (akin to a thick wire), heated up. The pointed protrusions (or movable spines) around the tail-end area of the shell are made from bronze, which Stelk grinds on a grinding wheel to sharpen their pointed ends and give them texture.

Stelk’s horseshoe crabs are a mottled red, black, and copper color that comes naturally from the annealing process. She finishes the entire shell with a coat of butcher’s wax, which she prefers to polyurethane because polyurethane eventually peels, and because butcher’s wax is easy to reapply, if needed. Kept indoors, the crabs will remain more or less unchanged indefinitely, though they will darken somewhat and develop a more leathery look. Displayed outdoors, they take on a verdigris patina. The crabs come with a small hook on the underside so they can be hung on a wall, or they can be used as table sculptures.

Marla Stelk has taken one of nature’s more homely creatures and made it beautiful in art. Wherever her horseshoe crabs are displayed, they remind us of the quirky, yet perfect, engineering found in the natural world. “We always think faster and bigger is better,” says Stelk, “but these critters have proved us wrong. They’re not very big, and they’re some of the slowest-moving animals on the planet, but they’ve been around for a long, long time.”