Branded Irons

"Branded Irons," is made with the burns or "scorches" of different irons. Cole's mother and grandmother were housekeepers and often asked him to fix their broken irons. When he moved into his first studio in 1980, he had as many as fifteen to twenty of his family's broken irons with him. "But," Cole says, "I was a painter then...and I threw those irons away. The iron and scorch pieces started five or six years later, with my seeing an iron on the street for many days and noticing it had a face on it that looked like a West African mask... I brought it here (his studio) and photographed it and put the picture on the wall. And for about a year I was always finding irons. It was almost like that first iron had made me an iron savior."