A nomadic tribe, the artists who work in hot iron roam the world in search of iron pours. They tend to know each other; they join together to create the pours, because it's not something you can do alone.
Northland pours -- including the upcoming North Shore Iron Pour near Poplar -- tend to draw some of the same people -- Felicia Glidden, Jeffrey Kalstrom, Alair Wells, Coral Lambert, Tamsie Ringler, Jim Brenner, a few more -- and always new people who are interested in the medium and want to learn how to perform this ancient technology.
The North Shore Iron Pour has become a tradition. Sponsored by the Common Language artists' collective, this year's pour will be the seventh.
The mini-blast furnace used to melt the iron needs a crew to tend and run it. Ideally, the crew is big enough so that people can spell each other -- it's hard, hot labor. The North Shore Iron Pour uses 16-20 people to break the scrap iron, smash up the coke into small nuggets, stoke the furnace and carry the crucible by its pair of long handles to the molds to pour off the melted iron.
Many of the crew members who will be there are experienced. Jeffrey Kalstrom, the mold captain and founder of the pour, said about half of the people there have 10 years of practice. But there are some who have never done the work before. It's how the knowledge is passed on -- from person to person, pour to pour, day by day, Kalstrom said.
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There's a couple of spots open on the crew this year, because two people couldn't come. If you want to learn the skill and spend a week doing sculpture, making molds and pouring iron into them, you can.
This year's pour will be directed by Felicia Glidden, who helped to build the furnace -- named Aurora -- that lives at sculptor Ben Effinger's rural studio near Poplar. Aurora now melts the iron every year for the event.
Glidden got involved with the iron pours because of her interest in working with other artists. She offered a location for the second iron pour: Larry Ronning's property north of Two Harbors, known as the Homestead. A motley crew of sculptors settled in and constructed molds for their sculptures for a week, and then poured more than a hundred works.
The furnace for that pour was brought north by Coral Lambert, an English sculptor then living in New Orleans. The pour was done at night, because of rain. The night pour became a North Shore tradition, because the blazing iron was so beautiful and exciting in the dark.
"After that, Coral brought me to Wales for the U.S.-U.K. Iron Symposium," said Glidden, something that Kalstrom also experienced. There, iron sculptors from around the world come together to share knowledge. They brought what they knew back to Minnesota, and Glidden decided to build a furnace that would belong to the North Shore Iron Pour.
"I didn't know anything about fabricating. Coral [Lambert] sent me the plans, and what I'd need to buy. I had the steel cold-rolled at North Shore Steel in Two Harbors. Aurora was built by three women -- Coral, her student, Alair Wells, and me -- in Jim Madison's metal shop on Madison Avenue in Knife River," Glidden said.
Lambert named the furnace. She spoke about how the light of the fire related to the light in the aurora borealis, and that a northern furnace should have a northern name.
Aurora produces some remarkable works: Watch for the show at Lizzard's Gallery later this summer of art from the pour, and for Jeffrey Kalstrom's show of 10 years of iron work this fall at UMD's Tweed Museum.
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ANN KLEFSTAD covers arts and entertainment for the Duluth News Tribune. Read her blog, Makers, at duluth.com, and at Area Voices on duluthnewstribune.com. Reach her at aklefstad@duluthnews.com .
