Exploring art of casting bronze
A handful of community members are learning the old trade of bronze casting with the lost wax method in the Centre for the Arts at the University of Lethbridge.
The course started four years ago as an initiative to bring people into the university to learn about the unique process of creating a sculpture out of bronze.
“It is intended to be a community outreach initiative to bring people from the art community and the community in general to the university to take part in this process which is pretty special,” says Niall Donaghy, Facility Manager of the Facility of Arts.
“It was an opportunity for people in the community to see this process because it is not a very common process to be casting bronze and the fact that we have this state-of-theart foundry in the back that isn’t really known about is pretty amazing.”
Over the six week non-credit course, students work through all of the steps to making their own custom piece, from creating the wax mould by hand, layering the mould in coats of sand and ceramic, pouring the 1,200-degree molten bronze, grinding out the imperfections and learning how to coat the metal with chemicals to add colour.
“It is a real crash workshop to give the basic understanding of how it is done,” says Kevin Sehn, Course Instructor. “We have several students that take the course multiple times, because the first time they learn just the basics and just get used to the facilities and learning just how to do a bronze cast, and once they know that, they see students at different levels who have done the course a couple of times who are doing hollow casts or larger castings of pieces, so then they come back to do more.”
Sehn worked in the Department of Arts at the university for 15 years as a technician, but now resides in Edmonton working at a bronze foundry making pieces for the community including new bronze art pieces found around the city. Sehn says the long lost art of bronze casting is still viable today.
“It is just an interest in the form, it is a 5,000-year-old technology, and it is something that is very viable today,” says Sehn. “We found with things like 3D printing and you can find that you can print things just like wax that can melt out so you can go straight from a 3D-print to a bronze cast object, it is a brand new technology that is being added to this really old technology and blend them together so you can get the best of both.”
Andrea Bowes, from the Edmonton Arts Council, discovered the course after new art pieces spread out through Edmonton, and decided she would give a try at the old trade from the man who helped decorate the city with bronze.
“He just completed a public art course for us and I found out that he moved from here to up there and that he taught this course and that this course existed so I decided to try it out,” says Bowes. “I have been working on small pieces, I sculpted an acorn, a turtle and some mushrooms. It was quite fun, it is really interesting to work with wax as a sculpting medium, it has its characteristics that I’m sure over time comes skilled with, but at this point this is all that I have managed.”
The University of Lethbridge offers the bronze casting course twice a year, and is open to the public to join. No previous casting experience is required, but the class spots are limited due to space, resources and instructors. For more information, visit ulethbridge.ca/finearts/bronze-course.