Striking Art While the Iron Is Hot

With its manually operated crane, stacks of concrete blocks and piles of scrap metal, the fenced area behind the Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building could be mistaken for a construction site on campus. It’s actually the Sculpture Yard, home to the equipment for art Professor John Ruppert’s metal-casting sculpture course.

One day each semester, Ruppert invites local artists to join his students in liquifying iron to fill the molds they’ve created. Fifteen people operate the old-fashioned furnace, with some Terps up top funneling in iron and coke, a refined coal that heats the iron to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The Nov. 5 iron pour, as it’s known, drew some 25 people to take part in and watch the sweaty, labor-intensive process.

“You can only be up there for, like, maybe 20 minutes, and then you have to step down and get some water,” said Theodore Jonas ’23.

After the molten metal pours from the bottom well, artists have about 30 minutes to work with it before it starts to set. Their molds are made of resin-bonded sand, which firms up to a sandstone-like texture.

In an industrial and artistic process at once ancient and complex, the students “have to build a 3D puzzle around a pattern, then take the puzzle apart, take the pattern out, put the puzzle back together, and fill the void with metal,” said Ruppert, who has taught the class since 1987.

Here, Maryland Today gets into the flow of the iron pour.