Material Laboratories: Metal Fest
National Sculpture Factory
5 October 2024
The night of Psyche II, James L. Hayes’s collaborative performance, was one of the wettest nights of the year. Despite the orange weather warning for rain, the event – which centred on an outdoor live iron casting in the yard of the National Sculpture Factory – proceeded. The result was an epic battle with the elements: a battle to get the huge iron furnace up to a temperature of 1500 degrees in driving rain; a battle to keep the moulds for the pour sufficiently hot; and a battle to prevent the molten iron from exploding in showers of sparks, when in contact with water. There was something undeniably operatic about the spectacle as helmeted and leather-clad bodies laboured in clouds of steam or crouched beside the furnace to catch the boiling iron in their ladles.
This was a decidedly durational event, and over the course of the evening, the liquid iron became a wilful actor and agent at the heart of the performance. The molten metal can reach temperatures of between 2350 and 2700 degrees centigrade, and therefore the live casting required watchful attention and precisely coordinated movements. Hayes’s Pschye II required four participants to move in careful synchronicity to pour the electric-orange liquid into a massive sand mould on the floor. This would gradually harden into a huge, dark ring of metal, to be raised into the aperture of the NSF’s massive loading bay doors. As clouds of steam and smoke filled the factory vault, the sense of ritual intensified.
Michał Staszczak’s European Sunrise – A Tribute to Griff (2024) involved a mandala-like structure, raised on a lever mounted pole, a shape that invoked the commemorative, reverential elements of holy architectures. When Staszczak poured a volume of molten iron into the vessel, the structure was hoisted aloft and set alight against the night sky.

Psyche II took place as part of ‘Metal Fest’ (1 – 5 October 2024) – the third iteration of NSF’s Material Laboratory Programme, focusing on material research and medium-specific practices. The festival brought together leading artists and educators from across Europe and the US, who focus not simply on casting technologies and their histories, but on new modes of materiality. Hayes, for example, an artist and lecturer in MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, has been involved in metal casting since the 1990s. He spent seven years with AB Fine Art Foundry in London, working on multi-million-pound projects for artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor, and Barry Flanagan, amongst others. These projects were predominantly realised in bronze, a famously costly material with an imposing classical pedigree. Cast iron, however, is infinitely more democratic, both as material and as a process. Iron is a ubiquitous and commonplace material – it is in our blood, it is under the ground, it is a key substance in the formation of tools for everything from farming to war. Iron is a marker of time, as in the Iron Age. It is also ejected from the debris of dying stars.
Psyche II has a conceptual grounding in the recent NASA explorations of 16 Psyche, a 140-mile-wide iron and nickel asteroid, floating in our solar orbit between Mars and Jupiter. No spacecraft has ever visited an object like 16 Psyche, which is thought to be the exposed core of a demolished planet. The mission, NASA scientists argue, offers a way to explore our own planet, as the composition of 16 Psyche is thought to be similar to that of Earth’s deep interior, the metal core which acts as heat engine, driving the movement of tectonic plates.
Despite this connection to cutting-edge astronomical research, the performance of Psyche II hinged on the undeniably alchemical drama of cast iron pouring – the transmutation of a base material to a molten golden liquid. Crucially, the etymology of the word alchemy can be traced back to the Egyptian kēme or ‘black earth’, forging a link, then, between the earliest experiments in material transformation and iron as a prima materia.1 The names given to the eras in human history – stone, bronze, iron, and now silicon – chart the ways in which our understanding of matter has transformed culture.

A project as hazardous and exhaustingly labour intensive as this requires meitheal. Curated by NSF Programmes Manager, Dobz O’Brien, the event was facilitated and managed by a team of leading cast iron artists and educators. Running the furnace were Eden Jolly and Stephen Murray, with assistance from artists Fionn Timmins, Agnieszka Zioło and Murrough O’Donovan. Beyond the undeniably spectacular nature of the live casting experience, what Psyche II demonstrated was the ways in which a curiosity about the capacities of material can open onto much broader and more far-reaching questions, and therefore can expand our way of thinking. As a society we are largely unaware of the trail followed by common materials as they go from the earth into our hands. This event offered a greater appreciation of the basis of the material world, demonstrating both the beauty and the hard graft behind the manipulation of physical matter.
Sarah Kelleher is a writer and curator based in Cork, and a lecturer in Art History and Theory at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design.
@sarahkell77
1 Douglas Harper, ‘Alchemy’, Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com