Casting in Bronze

pouring molten bronze into molds for our series of sculptures for Sunnyside Conservatory in San Francisco

We were thrilled to witness the bronze casting of our series of sculptures for the Sunnyside Conservatory Menagerie yesterday at Berkeley’s Artworks Foundry. It has been an honor to collaborate with artisans skilled in the ancient art of lost wax casting and opens up a world of possibilities for our future public projects. While the technique is more resource intensive than any we have employed to date, it has me thinking about the trade-offs and potential rewards of purely aesthetic experiences over a longer time frame. I wonder if there is a metric to compare the impact of things designed to stimulate the public imagination against the effects of the extraction of resources that brought them into being.

fine dry sand is aerated to coat the silica-ceramic molds (see above) for casting bronze