Feature image: Courtesy of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry.
The story of the first artist residency at our aluminum foundry in Manitowoc
By Chris Redmond and Sachin Shivaram
Manitowoc, WI – Lenny usually says what is on everyone’s mind. He is one of our longest-serving employees at Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry. After 40 years of grinding, it out in a foundry, you pretty much get to say what you want. “Why are we paying an artist?” was his question on our internal Facebook page, and he immediately garnered a slew of likes and loves. The past few years had been difficult for our company, with the drumbeat of layoffs solemnly in the background as we adjusted to an uncertain economy.
It was impossible to make the reply posting sound like anything other than a CEO with his head in the clouds. “The reason we launched the artist in residence program is the same reason we have family events like Polly’s Pumpkin Patch, why we give to charity, why we sponsor kids in the community to go to college, why we built a nice break room, why we plant hydrangeas in front of the plant. It’s a privilege that we can spend a little bit of money to help create joy in the world around us.”
Initially, this was the experience of creating art in a place that feels anti-art – a shrill defense shouted into the wind.
The artist Lenny was asking about is Chris Redmond. The piece he made, over the course of a year inside our foundry in Manitowoc, is a cast metal mandala roughly five feet across. Aluminum, stainless steel, and aluminum bronze, with a polished red brass mirror at its center. The radial geometry of the frame is drawn from the arcs of Chris’s own forearms, repeated nine times. The brass hemispheres along the outer ring have been hand-sanded to catch light the way sun catches water.
Chris came to this design by way of the Field Museum in Chicago, where the collection manager, Jamie Kelly, agreed to walk him through more than two hundred antique Asian mirrors. He had been reading about a class of Han Dynasty bronze objects called TLV mirrors, named for the T, L, and V shapes pressed into their backs. The reverse face of a TLV mirror is a cosmological map: cardinal directions, animal motifs for the constellations, the seasons rendered as geometry. The front face, ground by hand, is a polished surface meant to return a clear human image. Two human impulses in a single cast object. The urge to understand the world, and the urge to understand yourself.
The mirror tradition itself was already a synthesis. Across centuries of casting, the form absorbed motifs from elsewhere along the Silk Road, and the brass alloys themselves came in from India with Buddhism. By the time Chris was studying these objects in their glass cases, the tradition had been in motion for more than 2,000 years.
Many of the mirrors at the Field came to Chicago in the early 1900s in the company of a curator named Berthold Laufer, who traveled through a collapsing imperial China with one donkey cart, buying artifacts from people at the edges of warring regions. The objects in his cart were almost certainly spared destruction in the Cultural Revolution that came a half century later. They sit now in glass cases on Lake Shore Drive, where an engineer turned artist from Wisconsin came to study their backs.
The radial designs on those backs reminded Chris of Buddhist sand mandalas, so he drove to a temple in Madison and watched monks build one. Beginning at the center and working outward, they laid colored sand into geometric patterns using no tools, only knowledge. When the mandala was complete, they swept it inward, carried the sand to a body of water, and offered it. Not destroyed. Returned.
Chris drove home with a design in his head and walked into our foundry.
A foundry is no place for the unhurried. Forklifts move constantly. Molds the size of cars hang from gantry cranes. Around any corner, something is happening or about to. Into this Chris brought a sculptor’s geometry and a researcher’s questions, and the workers absorbed him. Wyatt, in the pattern shop, suggested building the mold boxes from plywood with casters on the bottom so even the largest could be rolled by one person; this was only the first of many of his practical inventions. Aaron and Jerzy taught Chris air-set sand and the overhead cranes. Robert and Mark handled the pours. Cory welded the parts together. John watched over. Chris would say later that the workers reminded him of the monks in Madison: people whose expertise was so internalized it read as instinct, decades folded into the kind of remark one only half-hears.
Manitowoc is a hard-drinking town of union manufacturing jobs. A place where the pleasures of art seem yet to be discovered. It is also a place where people are genuinely curious when something new lands in their lives – like when a hot piece of Sputnik IV crashed into the middle of 8th Street in 1962, which in turn sparked an annual wacky tacky celebration of sci-fi culture (the patrolmen who first spotted it assumed it was slag from a local foundry).
By spring, foundry workers were telling visitors about Han Dynasty mirrors and Berthold Laufer’s donkey cart. It was, in its own way, the inversion that gave the project its meaning. The people of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry are accustomed to taking pride in where their castings end up: a Hellcat lid under a hood, a satellite in orbit, a surgical robot in an operating room. The mandala was not going anywhere like that. It would only sit somewhere and be looked at. What the workers connected to instead was where it came from, from a tradition older than most nations and from their own hands.
The mirror at the center of the piece is just large enough to hold a human face. Stand in front of it and you will see yourself, but only roughly. The reflection distorts at the edges. The image is honest the way the people who know us best are honest: not in perfect clarity, but in the right vicinity of the truth.
Lenny’s question is the right question. Some version of it gets asked everywhere art is made, by someone who has earned the right to ask it. It is part of the work too.
Chris Redmond is a multidisciplinary storyteller and maker, specializing in metalworking. He is based in Milwaukee.
Sachin Shivaram is CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, a family-owned manufacturer in Manitowoc.