“First Fire” is actually a Hopi tradition to start off their
New Year, on or around winter solstice or as winter approaches. The fire is
started, often, with flint and steel and is a very special event and time
marker. Up in Taos, at Taos Mesa
Brewing, which lies between the Rio Grande Gorge bridge, a stunning, shocking
bridge that puts you dramatically in the face of beauty and death, out in the
middle of nowhere and the blinking light where you can turn left towards the
bridge, straight towards Questa and San Louis and La Veta Pass or right towards
the Sangre de Cristos and sacred Blue Lake.
The drive I took, with a big experiment; loading my bronze melting
furnace and the equipment to pour bronze onto a small trailer, us hailing from
Spirit Valley, New Mexico and me a little nervous about the great weight, the
functionality of my brake lights and turn signals and the tire’s wear (as I had
just recently resorted to taking the wheel and bearing off and taking a steel sleeve
and a huge cheater pipe and bending the axle end straight after some event had
bent in some time ago and worn down two sets of tires in short order). I had promised to bring the furnace,
forgetting how heavy it really was, despite being on wheels. It was a gift from Harry Leippe, retired
professor of sculpture and bronze casting down (or up, depending how you look
at it) at Highlands, Las Vegas. The
furnace was built by a man named Jason who was a student of bronze and a
stunningly gifted welder and the furnace and fan system was made over thirty
years ago and had never been used since it was made and then given to me. I have used it for pushing 10 years now,
first creating an amazing solid bronze cast helical staircase and first floor
balustrade with it and many other items, including a ceremonial bronze wedding
bowl for my daughter when she got married.
We cast it with mostly family members during the profound storm in late
December 2006 that dumped nearly 2 feet of snow on us that night (adding to the
12” already on the ground) and casting it was amazing drama as snow glumps fell
all around the crucible full of molten bronze metal. So there has been some
drama around this and drama is nothing new for melting metal.
It took three hours to drive from Santa Fe to Taos Mesa,
past Tres Piedras on the proud old highway called 285 (it goes on to Denver,
Colorado, through some of the most beautiful mountain and passes in the world
and is a great road to travel on). To me
it is as interesting and useful as Route 66 is touted; 800 some miles from
Texas to Denver, going up from Clines Corners and about 2 miles from our ranch.
Once there, Taos Mesa Brewing is an exciting place, with the
arched quansit roof, a new amphitheater of a sculptural nature, a sculpture
garden that includes Thor’s Raven- “Conspiracy” (that’s the term for plural
ravens!), horseshoe pit, outside tables, a huge white sculptural crane, a
restaurant, stage and dance floor and a great view of the Sangres across the
sagebrush laden plains. There is
something about the place that makes it really special and worth visiting. That is just a side attraction for me, as
there is so much going on for the pour that most of the surroundings are a bit
of a blur. This time there were 3 or 4
stations where wrought iron items were being created in small forges of various
sorts, including an antique hand cranked forge.
The persons “manning” the forges were mostly women, as far as I could
tell and they looked like they knew what they were doing; BadAss Women all around this place; no place
for discrimination or pre-judging who is capable of what, as those notions need
to fall by the wayside.
Lance was there, from Hayes, Kansas, with his wild and cool
trailer that holds his iron melting cupula furnace, tall when erected and
capable of being operated by one person
(in a pinch), including an operating arm that holds the “ladle” (term to
describe the “bucket” that carries and holds the molten cast iron, which
consists of recycled cast iron shards that are created by breaking up old tubs,
stoves, radiators….anything made of grey metal or cast iron….not “steel”, which
melts at a higher temperature and is not “brittle” like cast iron). Lance has attached all kinds of cast iron skeletal
parts, skulls and such to his amazing ensemble of equipment and can also stand
on the loading platform with his electric guitar and sing into a microphone
attached to a rod welded to the furnace and play some “heavy (and loud) metal”,
drowning out any other sounds until the mike gets so hot he has to step down
and rethink the whole thing. Up in
Laramie a few months ago, at the Western Cast Iron Art Biennial, I had to fill
in for him after the mike overheated and I plugged into his amp and jammed a
shovel into the ubiquitous piles of sand nearby and sang into my “can” at full
tilt, as I have done some at pours over the years. It is best, for both of us, to have a full
roar of blowers and furnaces and propane burning and activity to get the real
effect of this experience.
Lance Wadlow and his cupula rig
Aztec dancers and Fire
Globe (left), amphitheater, Lance’s Furnace (with arm and skeleton), Sangre de
Cristos and sand pile.
Out of the blue came Aztec Fire Dancers from Las Vegas onto
the stage and danced up a storm just as Ben Remmers and I lit up his “Fire
Globes” with a weedburner. Lance was
busy busting out some old unwanted material from the belly of his furnace and
fine tuning everything and then lit the furnace as the crowds continued to
watch in various stages of wonder. I was
asked to come up with a hook for Lance’s ladle and so I sidled over to the
first blacksmithing woman I saw and Ben Remmers
(main coordinator for this event and a master pourer) cut a short piece
of 3/8 steel and we heated it up and I made a hook on one end and a closed loop
on the other and installed it on the spot.
Time wore on and people kept coming up to me and talking about how they
worked at Shidoni foundry at some point
or are thinking about making a furnace, others chatted around with questions
and David Lobdell , mentor to us all and head of the art department and iron
and bonze caster extraordinaire, showed up with his “letters to the universe”
installation which is a rather large
arch that he pumps propane into and it lights up and glows and can be fed
wishes and thoughts on paper that burn up and enter into the multidimensional
multiverse for processing of all sorts.
I was thinking about my great long-time friend getting a blood and stem
cell transplant as we were busy pouring iron and praying, through these
mediums, for her.
Now the pour is in full swing and we have all hurriedly
donned our protective gear: helmet and mask of wire mesh or vinyl, heavy
gloves, leather jacket over cotton clothing, leather chaps and steel toed boots. There is work to be done, in the dark except
for a few little lights, a strobe light (new), a flashlight or two and the
light of the molten iron in the ladle and now being poured into molds of all
sorts or onto a performance piece of wood and other items (spraying sparks in
an amazing dazzle of fire, showering us all in its display and creating a
mixture of profound fear and eye opening excitement).
Ben’s
Performance Piece
The ladle is extra
heavy and pouring less metal that usual, but we make do, doubling up on the
handles and using every last ounce of strength and tolerance to get the job
done. Mistakes and disappointments need
to move to the back burner as there is so much happening; there is no time or
energy for that kind of extraneous foolishness.
The scene is like a shadow play as the ghosts move around in the dark
doing their tasks with quiet determination and acting out a drama that is, in
many ways, timeless, whether is it going in for the final kill in a hunt and
doing the butchering and skinning; being in some aspect of a battle of some
sort where life is on the line and things must be done; delivering a baby;
sailing a ship in a storm…..but this is all to make art (performance or
sculptural).
Then, in a new phase, the bronze furnace is lit (a few times
to get the balance of air and fuel right, as the fan is blowing to increase the
heat and the propane is added carefully).
Finally, after much adjustment and careful tending, there is a roar like
a jet engine or a lion or a tornado (which it is in there) and bits of bronze
get fed into the crucible and, after what seem like an eternity and on the
brink of failure, the metal begins to pool.
Then the bronze is fed into the roaring hole and finally heats up to
2000 some degrees and the molds, which have been preheating in another furnace,
are poured. This is after the furnace is
turned off, the roar is gone, a eerie silence prevails, a heat coming from the
glowing crucible can cause a deer in the headlights affect because of it’s
obvious power, the lifting tongs are dropped carefully onto the crucible and we
now lift it above our heads to get it out and ease it onto the ground where
another device for carrying and pouring is waiting. It is attached with an arm that is supposed
to hold the crucible tight and then the metal is “skimmed” with a steel
implement and then we walk to the now ready molds and pour them, like
water. The pour is soon over, for better
or worse and, in this case, a lot was poured onto the wood performance frame
which is now covered with cast iron that is full of openings and interesting
patterns. Other molds are tended and
then the crucible is scraped out and replaced for the next pour. 
Pouring Bronze from Thor’s furnace
It is now over and it is getting late and there is lots of
work to do to clean up and pick up and disassemble and tie down. I left by 10:30 with an eight food long mold
with just enough metal poured onto it (this being a performance style
open-faced piece) and another snake or buffalo gourd and cholla performance
piece and got home by 4:30 that morning.
This describes, briefly, some of the things that happen
during an iron pour and what happened at the Iron Brew 2 pour in Taos on
December 20, 2014. I hope it helps or
inspires other to understand or want to do something like this as it is a
chance to put one’s mind and body and resources together and gaze into the
depths of hell (although Dante’s Inferno is, actually, frozen) on a cold day
where molasses flows slowly near January and see if this might just be the
meditation and therapy the sorcerer ordered. Happy Sparking !
Here are the names of a few of the people involved in the pour: David lobdell;Ivy Little,Justin Kaysing,Kim Henkel;Kyle Yonan, Lance Wadlow, Nicole Thibodeau, Thor Sigstedt<adventuretrails@earthlink.net,
"Q", Jake Parison.
Dani Cedillo (fire dancer)
