In the heart of Durham Central Park on Saturday, orange plastic fences surround three large furnaces where the fires burn at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s 4:30 p.m., and against a hard hip-hop beat, student teams and pourmasters, or experienced iron sculptors, feed iron blocks into the furnaces. Clad in thick brown coats, bulky gloves, heavy rubber boots, and orange or yellow helmets with clear protective gear over their faces, the pourmasters and student teams dart around with shovels, feeding iron blocks into the furnaces.
As the flames build, the furnaces melt the iron into a red, lava-like substance that oozes into sculpture molds. The molds move down a conveyor belt as students from local universities shovel them off to the side to cool.
Nearby, a brown metal dragon spits fire upwards in the middle of Foster Street, welcoming guests to the 8th Annual Iron Pour hosted by Liberty Arts, a local arts organization and foundry. The event is free, but each time a guest donates $20 to the organization, the dragon’s flames roar, contributing to the symphony of music and chatter.
Just past the stage with a DJ, Kaisiya Collins and Larissa Wood stand in front of a white tent, beckoning people over to a large blank canvas waiting to be covered in paint.
“I feel like art is always fun to witness and experience,” Wood shouts over the music. “It brings some levity, but also just some variety and excitement.”
Underneath the green awning tracing the edges of the park is an art market where hordes of people pause to gaze at clay dishes, vibrant art prints, multicolored marbles, sarcastic greeting cards, and an Iron Caster’s Gallery.
Leah Foushee-Waller wanders through the caster’s gallery, hesitating at each iron sculpture. Her eyes linger on the hard lines, taking in a circular bronze sculpture with cutouts of thin circles at the top, jagged edges at the bottom, and a mask-like face in the center.
This is far from Foushee-Waller’s first time at the event. She was here eight years ago when Tripp Jarvis, a local sculptor and one of this evening’s pourmasters, brought the Iron Pour to Durham Central Park for the first time.
Foushee-Waller has been a part of Liberty Arts since its founding. She and her husband, Michael Waller, were recruited in the early 2000s to build “Major,” the iconic bull statue in downtown Durham, out of bronze. The public was able to watch the casting process in an open-air pavilion at the end of Liberty Warehouse. This project laid the foundation for Liberty Arts’ creation as a nonprofit foundry, eventually expanding to include 13 studio artists offering classes in glassblowing, ceramics, metals, jewelry, wood, and painting.
Scanning the park, Foushee-Waller points out her former students, along with previous students of her husband and their former East Carolina University professor, Carl Billingsley, who have returned to the event as volunteers, pourmasters, and guests. The Iron Pour is an extension of Liberty Arts’ educational mission “to create experiences that enhance artistic growth and community-building through art-making practices,” she says.
“So, in essence, the Iron Pour is a macro version of that artist or that experience. A more micro version would be teaching a class to a small group of students how to make glass pumpkins.”
Foushee-Waller returns to the Iron Caster’s Gallery, stopping to listen to the resounding drums of Batalá Durham.
Across from the Iron Gallery, William Davis, the former Hillsborough Poet Laureate, sits behind a gray typewriter, smiling at the little girl in front of him who whispers a poem request. Nearby, children race between multi-colored typewriters, smashing the keys as they attempt to write on the notecards. The Iron Pour “makes people aware of what can happen….,” Davis says. “And this is just a culmination of what Durham is supposed to be every single day.”
Just then, the crowd gasps. Beyond the fence, red, hot metal balls rain down from the sky and splatter across the dirt. The students scurry away, and the atmosphere eventually relaxes as the emcees strike a light note. (One artist whose personal protective equipment failed sustained a minor injury, event organizers later said. No students or attendees were harmed.)
Not far away, representatives of Shop Space, a Raleigh metalworking shop, demonstrate how to forge a hammer, using long metal tongs to pull out a red, hot piece of iron out of a miniature furnace.
By 6:30 p.m., the blank canvas overseen by Collins and Wood is completely different, covered in green, red, and yellow paint. As children run around the canvas and splatter paint across it, a child on a man’s shoulders takes a break to stare into the flames crackling in the night sky.
Above (from top): A fire-spitting dragon welcomes attendees to the 8th Annual Iron Pour; pourmasters, clad in protective gear, pour hot iron into molds. Photos by Kulsoom Rizavi — The 9th Street Journal
