From the outside, the Fire Arts Center is an unassuming place. It’s located on the second floor of a homely factory building on Honore just north of Berteau, on a stretch of road squeezed between the Metra’s Northern line and the el tracks. The center’s main entrance is through the loading dock.
could do their work,” says Hawkins. “We had a trash can with K-wool we used for a furnace. Real basic.”
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Conventional bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, with small quantities of other metals mixed in to bring out particular metallurgic virtues in the finished cast. But tonight the group is melting something called “Bill’s Funky Mix,” made from two buckets of plumbing parts Anders hauled in from his day job. He’s making a dozen copies of an antique coat hook he found at a junk shop, and he’s got two molds to fill. With their elaborate system of sprues–channels arranged to carry metal to each part of the mold as quickly and smoothly as possible–the molds look like a pair of chandeliers.
They’re made from colloidal silica gel mixed with refractory (heat-reflecting) powder. There’s a great tub of the stuff being rhythmically stirred by a mechanical agitator to one side of the shop; it looks like wallpaper paste. A student named Jim Graham is using it to make molds for a set of meditation gongs. Amid the din of the furnace and the general rush to prepare for the pour, he quietly paints layers of the slurry onto a wax pattern. He’ll alternate those with sprinklings of refractory powder, gradually building up a thin coat of stucco. When the ceramic material is dry, the wax pattern is melted out in the kiln, where Bill’s molds now wait to be preheated before the metal is poured. The preheat will help prevent the molten metal from starting to cool before the molds are filled.
He went on to study at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, propelled by a fascination with nature and form. “Back then Tyler was very much into performance, and very much into abstract expressionism. There’s not a lot of nature in either one of those things. Foundry was a good place to be because you could pretty much do whatever you want.”
At the melt, things are going full blast. All of the equipment is in use and the furnace is roaring when Hawkins realizes they’ve run out of Borax. The laundry additive is used as a flux: it bonds with impurities in the metal and rises to the top of the melt as a gray scum. Holladay runs out to Walgreens to pick up a box. In the meantime Hawkins throws a handful of sand on the melt, creating a sizzle and a cloud of sparks–“The sand makes the Borax goopy, so you can skim it,” he says. Then he starts looking for a box to use to hold the ceramic shell upright while the metal is poured into it.
