“Rivers of iron!” *
Canadian Society of Contemporary Iron Arts – CSCIA – is a non-profit collective/assembly of creatives promoting experimentation in contemporary iron arts. Our purpose is to promote the contemporary transformative processes in Canada through events and education. We aim to create opportunities to cast iron artworks and to meld historical industrial methods with modern artisanal processes, with a variety of mouldmaking and metal casting events for members and the greater public community.
Headquartered in Hamilton Ontario – a city long associated to metal works, and now a creative hub, CSCIA was born from long-time musing, materializing during the lull of early pandemic restrictions. CSCIA connects to networks of an international iron-casting artist community, south of the border and in Europe, through conferences and iron pour events.
The metal is sourced by recycling materials from demolitions and renovations, a re-use which lends special meaning to the process of making and artworks themselves.
Our iron furnace, Ruby, is a transportable cupolette furnace keen to demonstrate the almost alchemic transformation of discarded iron into molten glowing heat to sculptural and performance artworks which provoke and delight.
Save the date! We are back with our second public iron pour event on Saturday June 8th at the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology, after enthralling folks last year with the choreography of fire, flames and heat, turning solid metal to liquid orange hot liquid and filling moulds. Once again, there will be the opportunity to take home iron disks and tiles of their own design, made from open-faced "scratch blocks". We are pleased to report that the event this year is supported by a grant by the Ontario Arts Council.
New this year, there will be an accompanying Artists’ Talk on Friday June 7th, also at the museum, and an artworks display.
A video of the 2023 pour and the digital catalogue of our 2023 art exhibition are available under our events page. https://www.cscia.ca/our-events/
Check out our table at the May Hamilton Artcrawl for advance scratch blocks!
For more info, or to contact us, check out the CSCIA website
Hope you can join us sometime! Stay tuned for more details on upcoming events.
* exclamation by Tom Doughty – founding member and fabricator – upon seeing molten iron flow out during Ruby’s inaugural melt in November 2021
