PARTNER INFO:

So the iron casting process definitely appeals to the inner pyromaniac. My name is Marjee Levine. I’m Adjunct Professor here at Mass College of Art. I teach Foundry and Iron Casting. There are a lot of things that draw people to the process. I think that there’s an inherent physicality that people are drawn to. It’s also interesting to watch the students get sort of sucked in making the molds and smashing up the radiators and all that kind of stuff. It’s dangerous, so it needs to be well-organized.

One of the molds that we poured today was a bonded sand mold. The idea is to have clean, nice sand that’s a specific mesh to get as good detail as we can, right? If you use really gritty sand, it affects the surface of your casting, which is why we like Holliston Sand because we know that we can call and say, “I want 80 mesh sand.” And that gives us a really beautiful, pristine surface.

This process creates a really huge sense of camaraderie and community. The fact that it takes 10 people to make one person’s piece come out right is, I think, what draws a lot of students in. That everybody’s really helpful, everybody likes to make all their molds together. There’s awesome fire and there’s a little bit of danger and there’s definitely some aggression, brute force kind of stuff. But then at the end of the day, it’s really about the community.