Art of War: Naval Mines Become Furniture

(Nov. 18) -- At the height of World War II, as German U-boats patrolled the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland, they had to be extra careful, not only because of Soviet boat patrols, but also watching out for the naval mines being mass produced on little Naissaar Island, just northwest of the Estonian town of Tallinn.

The mines were Soviet-design deep sea mines shaped like oblong metal pills, nearly 3 feet in diameter with contact projections extending off their surface like blunted insect antennae as thick as fingers. Each packed a massive 500-pound charge that could send an armored warship to a cold, watery grave.

As it turns out, they also make a delightful addition to your living room.

When the Soviets began departing Estonia in 1990, they burned the explosives out of the mines and left them behind, littering the landscape with hundreds of remnant husks. While most would consider the scattered scrap metal shells to be a worthless eyesore, artists like Mati Karmin saw an opportunity.

He has turned the mines into furniture, crafting freestanding fireplaces, desks, strange cocoon-like chairs and other objects with their own rusty, jagged aesthetic.

Karmin, a 51-year-old graduate of the Estonian Academy of Arts, said he saw the mines and was interested in their unique visual form. "I was inspired the ideal geometrical form module: two hemispheres that have a cylindrical central part between them," Karmin told AOL News. "It gives me endless opportunities to frame up different forms and shapes."

Combined with other common details in the mines like holes for blasting caps, shackles and thick ring hoops to allow the mines to be lifted, Karmin said he never had to worry that the finished surface would ever be boring.

The fireplace sculpture is a 3-foot spherical mine with a glass face reminiscent of the faceplate on a classic copper-and-brass diving helmet. The mine has been vertically pierced with a 1-foot-wide tube that serves as a stand beneath the mine and a chimney above it. The mine still bears the thick scars of the original welds, assorted bolts and screws of military design pierced with thick metal rings that look like door knockers from Hades itself.

While a lot of what Karmin makes straddles the line between usefulness and aesthetic value, he insists that all of it is functional.

Still, some of the pieces border on the bizarre, like a claustrophobic toilet that would be more at home in a prison camp and a thick metal baby carriage with an assortment of grenades strung across the opening, looking like the world's most hard-core baby toys.

Karmin says the greatest challenge for him is making that first cut, likening it to the first incision made by a surgeon, knowing that the wrong cut into the thick steel can affect the entire project, and he prefers to minimize how much he changes the original mines.

He's comfortable with what he's made so far but keeps thinking about larger and larger pieces, and hopes to find more financial support to incorporate bigger forms (made with mine shells) in urban spaces.

Karmin also wants to create something fun. "I would like to make a retrolike race car where two to three people would sit behind each other -- like in bobsleds."

If not, he can still work in smaller spaces that are only limited to how imaginative he can be with the historical remnants of war repurposed into new and creative uses.

"They carry human touch and history in themselves," Karmin said, "as most art [does]."