By William Rogers

The Oswego State art and technology departments are set to hold their annual iron pour at the end of April in celebration of the thousands of years old art form of metal casting.

This marks an important return of the event, which was canceled last year due to the pandemic. The last time an iron pour was held was in 2019 by the technology department. The last time it was a joint effort with the art department was 2018.

SUNY Oswego technology professor Richard Bush is leading the event alongside art professor Benjamin Entner. The event allows students taking sculpture classes to cast metal sculptures of their own designs. 

“An iron pour is a very unique and uncommon experience,” Entner said in an email. “For students involved it is collaborative, primal, and down right exciting. They learn a very old technique but more importantly they learn to make art as a team or rather a community.  In an iron pour, every participating student has a role and all roles are necessary for the pour to function both safely and successfully.  I am always amazed how a class’ dynamic changes after the iron pour.”

The metal casting works by superheating metal to the point where it becomes liquid. The resulting material is then poured into students’ molds of their work.

“Basically we have built a simple furnace, called a cupola, which is heated with purified charcoal, coke, until it gets to about 3000 degrees,” Entner said. “To this we add scrap iron: old pipes, radiators, car rotors, that are then heated until they are liquified. The liquid metal is then captured in a large ladle and [poured] into molds to create student-designed objects and sculpture.”

Anyone in the campus community can participate in the pour. Arts Alive, SUNY Oswego’s art club, will be providing “scratch blocks’’ to anyone in the campus community. These blocks made of easily sculptable material allow anyone to carve a sculpture design to be casted. 

In the past the event would collaborate with Oswego High School to allow their students to have their own scratch blocks casted, and the group looks forward to collaborating with them again this year.

The event will conclude with the burning of a 10 foot tall wood effigy, designed and crafted by advanced sculpture students Michaela Lawrence and Kayla Kitchener.

This year marks a special collaboration between the sculpture class and the newly started virtual reality based art class. Headed by SUNY Oswego professor Rebecca Thompson, the class uses virtual reality to create artwork using programs such as Gravity Sketch and MasterpieceVR.

This year, the VR students are designing sculptures in VR to be printed using 3D printers. These plastic models will then be used as molds for the iron pour, effectively taking a virtual sculpture and making it tangible.

“It’s going to be really cool to see the little figures we made in VR come to life in 3D and come into even more life in the iron pour,” Samantha Whitman, a student in the VR class said. “They can be like really cool paper weights.”

The iron pour will take place on April 22, in The Pit, located on the Northside of Tyler Hall facing the Hewitt Quad. The event will take place throughout the afternoon and will be free and open to the public.

Image via Matthew Hernandez