Iron Tribe Event at NMHU/ photo by Birdie

The face of a man – curiously missing eyes, missing teeth, his brain seemingly evaporated – almost grins from a pedestal in Burris Hall. Spikes protrude from his head, evidence of a piercing gone mad, of the torture of migraine, of a troublesome mauling with oversized golf tees, perhaps, or martini stirrers. Matthew C. Wicker’s, “Stacks,” is both disturbing and hilarious at once. An artist from New York, Wicker is one of over eighty professional iron artists in Iron Tribe.

“I was trying to describe this group of people,” explains David Lobdell, NMHU Department of Fine Arts professor, and curator of the Iron Tribe exhibition, now on display through Friday, March 6. “We are willing to spend our extra money to do this – we’ll drive across the country, drive for 30 hours one way. We didn’t go to school together. I learned it after school, when I was just started out at Highlands. We’re not necessarily friends. We come together out of our mutual interest. The world Tribe seemed to suit the group best, especially for the name of a program that happens in New Mexico.”

David first developed an interest in art through the statues in his family’s church.

“Art to me was what was in church,” he remembers, “but what got me involved in ceramics in college was the Chinese emperor’s tomb with all the soldier’s in front of it, that’s what drew me into being an art major and doing ceramics. I like that connection between the old and the new. We have some of that going on with the Foundry program. Right now, in the exhibition we have this video going of African man iron working the way it’s been going on for 4,000 years, pounding hot iron on a rock. Some of my students complain that they can’t work on our old equipment, and here’s this mostly naked guy pounding on a rock and he’s making really cool things.”

David caught the red-hot fever ten years ago, during a sabbatical where he studied furnace designs and student fabrication. He traveled to Scotland first.

“I spent a month in Scotland,” he says. “I could afford the workshop so I went. Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution – they’re the ones that started doing all this stuff. The Welsh landscape has been completely transformed by the iron industry – mined up and scraped out.”

Held in odd-numbered years, Iron Tribe features a performance casting session, a production casting session, a panel discussion, an exhibition closing reception, and of course the captivating art filling Burris Hall’s gallery space. Disembodied legs vie with an iron bird manning a sling-shot machine for attention. Along one wall, a disconnected ear, mouth, and eye lay flat, refusing to partake in evil. Iron Tribers seem to favor body parts, seem to relish the idea of snagging bloody memory and encasing it in hot cold stone.

The process of casting sculpture is dangerous, almost glamorous, involving a mix of fire, careful preparation, with a side order of whimsy. All of the furnaces used in the program were handmade by the artists and given pet names – “Yer maw,” based on a Scottish version of “Yo Mamma,” “Dante,” “Scobby Do – the NMHU road furnace, and “Jose,” a new addition to the Foundry shaped like a tequila bottle with a sombrero-style lid.”

“In 1960, a guy named Julius Schmitt was working at UC Berkeley and he scaled down an industrial furnace, making one out of 5 gallon buckets. There’s a piece out in the show that was cast in that furnace back in 1960. Since then, we’ve taken those designs and modified them. A coupla furnace is one where you layer charges. They work better in higher altitudes like ours. There might be a thousand pounds of metal layered in there. Our biggest furnace taps out at 385 pounds. Our smallest taps out at 80 pounds. We’ll be running all three at the same time this weekend. We might be popping breakers like crazy, I don’t know,” David laughs.

Past Iron Tribes have attracted participants from all over the world. This year, David is expecting forty out-of-town guests, from across the country.

“We have people coming from California, New York, Minnesota, Houston. Most of the people that are coming are from this region. Kansas, Colorado, and Arizona are all bringing students. You never know who will show up, though. Last time the Irish showed up, as well as eight people from Wales.”

The festivities begin Thursday evening with a performance casting session at the NMHU Art Foundry at 11th and Rosenwald.

“People from Boston who are part of a guild called The Iron Guild – four of them are coming,” David notes. “They run a foundry, but they’re steel fabricators. They will come and work with us on Thursday night starting at 5 p.m. It doesn’t get dark until 6:30, which is when the really brilliant stuff starts. In a performance pour, we’re not pouring the hot metal into a traditional mold. We’ll pour it out onto an object on the ground, make combustible molds, things that will spit up like volcanos.”

David runs through a series of photographs on his computer, each one more fantastic than the next. He sits back in his office chair and smiles as each shot burst on screen. A river of molten metal pours through an open mouth, rivulets of iron streaming through the nostrils of a giant head. Another sculpture in the shape of a traditional standing mailbox looks ominous, alive, as hot metal rips through its body, creating an eerie red aura.

“That’s Vulcan’s Mailbox,” he laughs. “We have a lot of jokes around here. We call a lot of things “ferris” this and “ferris” that,” he says, referring to the chemical name of iron.

The program continues Friday afternoon with a panel discussion in room 129 of Burris Hall beginning at 2 p.m.
“On our panel discussion, we have four men,” David continues, “Wayne Potratz from UMinn – this year he will do his 40th pour at his university. He is responsible for starting all these conferences. With all of these incredible people coming, it would be stupid to not have them speak. George Beasley will talk – I give him credit for starting performance art with cast iron, and site specific art. He finds places on the map and pours an iron “x” and gets a GPS locator and marks it on a map with pins. One of those x’s is in my front yard.

“We also have Meredith “Butch” Jack from Houston. He has a lot of influence here. He works at Lamar in Beaumont. And finally, we have Tom Joyce  – a MacArthur Fellowshop awardee. The Genius Award. He is too humble a person for that. Whenever I go places I take him for granted. ‘The world’s greatest blacksmith.’ All four of these guys have worked with our students in some way. Specifically Highlands students.”

Following the panel discussion, a closing reception will be held in Burris Hall’s Art Gallery from 4 – 6 p.m. featuring food – from pans of enchiladas to posole to green chile stew to sopapillas – generously donated by a variety of local vendors including Charlie’s Spic and Span, Hillcrest Restaurant, Dick’s Restaurant, Johnny’s Mexican Kitchen, Kbobs, Estella’s, El Sombrero, Pam’s Flowers, Wal-Mart, Beans and Sweets, Abraham’s Tiendita, SPC, Lowes, Walgreens, ABL, and one student’s grandmother who is making homemade tamales. The Highlands Mariachi group will perform during the evening event.

The program concludes Saturday with a production casting session beginning at 9 a.m. on the grounds of the Art Foundry.

“On saturday when we’re pouring we always have a stage set up,” David says. “There’s lot of people who play instruments who will get up there between pours. The campus radio station will be there. This is the third time we’ve done the whole program as a class. A person has to cover the photography, another hangs the show, others do the performance and orchestrate things, a couple of students who are disk jockeys have created a soundtrack for us with metal songs, fire songs, burning songs.”

David laughs when asked if he and his students are the “bad boys” of art.

“I’ve been burned. I have some scars. Everybody has some scars. My mother gets so upset. ‘Don’t put my grandboys in that, David!’ But you know what? Football and rodeo are pretty dangerous, too. So we get some minor burns. Yeah, we are the bad boys and girls of art. We’re just not necessarily as pretty as some of the other art people… it does have some rougher connotations. We all dress in leather and brand the leather. It does have that kind of wild west appeal. The administrators are always fussing about how messy my casting yard is. You can’t claim it’s a pretty thing, but while it’s happening, there’s a magic to it. It’s working with physics.  We have this relationship to the sciences and industry.

David pauses, a huge grin cascading over his face. “You might say we have magnetic qualities.”

You can see all of my photographs of this event at my Flickr site.