The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Transforming Discarded Iron Into Meaningful Works of Art

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

On June 8th, 2024, the Canadian Society of Creative Iron Arts hosted an iron pour at the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology. The event was open to the public, with scratch blocks available for purchase. Attendees carved their own molds to be filled with molten iron, which once cooled could be taken home as a souvenir.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music On June 8th at the Hamilton Museum of Seamen Technology, the Canadian Society of Contemporary Iron Art got together for a public pour. We had a pretty great turnout. It was 700 people who came to see it. There was a core group of members who originated the Iron Pour Group. They started out as a dinner party and slowly worked their way towards building a furnace. The temperature of the furnace is brought up to 2800 degrees Fahrenheit to melt the

iron. The furnace was filled with many charges of iron, all collected from radiators around southern Ontario. So there were 1500 pounds of iron that went into it, and this is a kind of continuous feeding of the furnace throughout the day. And then as the charges fill the furnace, it's tapped and then the molten metal pours out and enters the ladle. It's very heavy the ladle weighs about 150 pounds when it's fully filled. The role of the people in the shovel is to protect the hand and the other molds from the pouring iron.

Most of the molds that were there on the day at the Sea Museum were two-part molds. The molds are made out of a resin bonded sand that is activated by CO2 to cure the resin within the sand. Scratch blocks are also made from the same sand. But it's an open face and it allows people to, same day, go in and carve the surface there and produce a piece to take home with them. And so it's a lot less prep time and more accessible, good first way to have an entry point to work with iron. Oh, an egg yolk!

It's a very unique metal to be using because it is so accessible and so affordable. You can pretty much get iron anywhere. Iron is often not even accepted by scrap yards because its value is so low. On the day of the event, when everyone comes together, you're pretty much just responding intuitively to how the metal looks, how it flows in the moment.

You're looking to all these hints within the metal, within the surface, as it's melting, to show you how you're going to end up responding to it. It's the surface of the metal, it's how it looks in the furnace, it's how it starts to like slowly drip out the side. These are all indications of when you're going to be coming in and ready to like tap the furnace. It's kind of a calm response between the organization of people there on the site,

and also a calm response with the furnace itself. This is a found frame collected with two river stones embedded within the center of it. And so you can see the attachment here from the gating system system where the pour cup would have been outside of the sandcast. Here's where the metal fills in in its molten state and then it slowly drops down into the

base here and fills out through the runners that are all these little connection points. And so it's covered in the sand, but as you work away, you kind of clear it off, you end up with more of the details underneath. It's a really intuitive kind of process. Something I think about a lot is the apparent permanence of metal. Something we think of as rigid, unyielding, something that doesn't change much. And with this permanence, you kind of end up with its counterpart. Reclaiming, reworking, melting down, tempering. All these ways that you can kind of renegotiate the material's form. It's very forgiving.