Pour it on

Saturday afternoon was ablaze at the Dry Ice Factory near downtown Denver as UC Denver students and faculty hosted an outdoor public iron pour Feb. 27.

Artists collaborated to heat and cast melted metal into ceramic shell and bonded sand molds. The audience watched in awe, and many also created their own tiles, which raised money for UCD 's sculpture club.

Rian Kerrane, area head of sculpture in the visual arts department, said, "We don't like to do it in the classroom. It's so exciting to watch, we really like to make it a public performance."

The department gathered 2,000 pounds of iron from a scrap yard and melted it at 2,700 degrees. About 100 pounds can be melted every 15 minutes, but it took all afternoon to complete the project.

"It's very communal, which is nice," Kerrane said. "You can't melt metal and have fire like that without thinking about having friends help you, because it's all heavy work." It takes at least 10 people to run a single cupola, the furnace used to melt the metal, but on Saturday there were at least 30 people in fire-resistant suits.

According to Kerrane, UCD is the only college in Denver that does iron casting, though it are part of a larger regional community.

In June of 2008, it hosted a conference of the Western Cast Iron Art Alliance, which represents states from California to Texas.

Professor David Lobdell from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, N.M. brought several students to participate. As hosts, UCD faculty and students did the setup and labor, and their out-of-town guests got to have their work cast. This iron pour networking offers a way for students to meet others in the field and to think about graduate opportunities, said Kerrane.

Pours happen about twice a semester, and this April UCD students will be doing a workshop and running pour for students at UC Colorado Springs, which doesn't have a foundry.

One of the students who will be leading this workshop will be senior sculpture student David Horner. Horner also built one of the two cupolas used on Saturday. Two semesters ago, as an independent study project, he and alumnus Alex Scott invested $3,000 to craft the steel cupola.

Horner has a long history of working with metal, which started at age 18 when he worked on diesel engines.

"I like metal," he said. "For me, scale is important. When you create a work of large scale, you have the opportunity to directly involve your audience."

Horner currently has an enormous piece of artwork made of steel located between the Arts Building and St. Cajetans that has been up since December. At the pour, he cast an 18-inch mockette of letters that spell "gratitude" after a poem his grandmother wrote in high school that inspired him to write and eventually to make art.

Horner plans for the final "gratitude" piece to be in his thesis show at Emmanuel Gallery at the end of the semester.