The Wake

In the University of Minnesota’s metal sculpting foundry, students and faculty take busted-up radiators, rusty cast-off hardware, and failed art projects, and heat them to more than fifteen hundred degrees Celsius until they are bright red and as runny as milk. Under the watchful eye of professor and renowned metal sculptor Wayne Potratz, molten scrap flows into sand molds and becomes fine art. Only when heat forces iron out of its cool, stable state can it transform. But for graduate student Allen Peterson, the catalyst for transformation was three years in the cold.

In order for the emerging artist to become a master of his medium, Peterson left his warm home state of Alabama for Minnesota. He grew up in Birmingham, a city forged by the iron and steel industries, and Birmingham is where he earned his bachelor’s degree in painting, then first learned metal casting. Peterson worked for three years as an artist in residence at Sloss Furnaces, a historic pig iron plant that now houses a metal arts program. He speaks romantically of his hometown. “I’ve got my little map in place there,” he says of the network of family, friends and artistic contacts that he left behind when he came to study under Potratz.

The artist is also a musician and played fiddle in an old-time southern string band until he moved north. Music is one thing Peterson didn’t leave in Birmingham. Some of his sculptures are mechanized string instruments, and his plectra cycle—an inverted bicycle whose gears pluck a string when the musician turns a peddle—won best instrument at the Cabooze Battle of the Jug Bands.

Peterson’s work at the U, along with that of seven other grad students, will culminate in a thesis exhibition at the Nash Gallery this month. With his installation, Peterson hopes to place the viewer in a strange environment. He’s cast nearly four thousand quarter-inch-thick iron hexagons, each with curving grooves cut into it, and he’ll arrange them like a mosaic on the floor and walls of a 15 by 15 foot section of the gallery. Visitors are meant to walk right on the iron tiles. The gallery floor will appear hilly with the help of mounds and slopes Peterson made from wood and sheet metal. The hexagonal tiles will form a honeycomb pattern (think ceramic bathroom floor pieces scaled up to 4 inches each), and the various curving grooves that cut through each one will connect in meandering rivulets like a map of waterways. An undulating, organic landscape gives way to a geometric grid gives way to flowing curves.

Maps inspired Peterson as he was designing the piece. “Any system of organizing information, I’m calling a map. To get across town we’ve got a map in our heads, or to get done whatever it is you need to get done on a given day, you’ve got maps of your resources,” Peterson said. “This installation is about navigation, about an individual finding a path across a system.”

Peterson is finding a path, and is transformed by the journey. He was drawn out of Alabama to become something a little different. But iron only flows for a moment before returning, in a new shape, to its original state, and Peterson hopes to soon return to Birmingham.

Refresh, a master of fine arts thesis exhibition, is showing at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery through May 6. The public is welcome to an opening reception on Friday, April 16 from 6 to 8:30 pm.

To see video of the artist casting iron in the U of M foundry, go to www.wakenews.org. To see a live iron pour, attend “Sorcerers of Iron and Fire,” the 35th annual University of Minnesota spring iron pour, featuring guest artists and students from around the United States, on Friday, April 23 at the Regis Center for Art on the U of M’s West Bank.