Sloss Furnaces 2019 National Conference on Cast Iron Art

Resident Artists

Foundry Manager

Odette is a metal artist devoted to learning and teaching metalwork as one gesture toward creating a world of collaboration and caretaking, rather than consumption and devastation. Afterwards art school they worked as a conservation technician rebuilding public sculptures, and then as a fabricator in a bronze foundry casting new artworks by gimmicky artists. Building on that experience, they held positions as a wood and metallic shop technician and an iron studio technician, teaching welding and fabrication to university and adult art students. Now Sloss Metallic Arts' Foundry Managing director, they aim to contribute to the time to come of cast iron and abound the organization with our talented team of foundry artists.

Ajene Williams

Senior Artist in Residence

Williams began his art training while attending Woodlawn High School, where he was taught and mentored by Jena Momenee.  Momenee enrolled him in the Summer Youth Program at Sloss Furnaces, where he was quickly recognized as a gifted artist, winning get-go place in the program's exhibition.  Thereafter, Williams was invited to work at Sloss Furnaces in 2011 as a paid intern.  He currently holds the prestigious title of Artist in Residence at Sloss Furnaces.

​

As a child, Ajene wanted to be a magician, "simply I was never very good," he says.  It didn't take long for him to realize that it wasn't the magician'due south equipment that made illusions, but rather the way the magician would use his hands.  "Hands are magic," he explains, "Nosotros tin can create annihilation with our hands, if we are able to imagine it."  Williams is gifted at manifesting exactly what he sees in perfect proportion, perfect harmony. Yet, he no longer seeks to create illusion with his magic.  Now, he seeks merely to show the globe'south deepest, most often missed truths.

Odette Blaisdell

Alexandra Rose

Artist in Residence

Alexandra Rose is an intermedia artist, gravitating toward metal in sculpture and photography. It  is the transformative nature of cast metallic that draws Rose to foundry work. At the age of eight,  they were melting pennies on the stovetop, watching the copper and zinc as it warped, waiting  for it to autumn autonomously and drip into something new, into something completely different from the one cent it once was. Metallic can be solid, firm, and rigid in one moment and the next; fluid, soft, and  delicate. This material duality is something Rose relates to as a nonbinary maker.
Rose's creative procedure is a therapeutic ritual based on connectedness to the material, intuition, and  concrete labor. Their work focuses on the body as the unique vessel for human feel,  revealing themes of growth, change, and the evolution of the authentic self. They utilize the  visual connotations of different materials to describe, clarify, and larn about their own butch femme-genderqueer torso. They use recycled fe, among other mediums, to address feelings  surrounding body paradigm, class, shame, gendered experiences, relation to society, and their  place in the natural world. Working cantankerous-disciplinarily to archive moments in time allows Rose  to create, reflect, release, and grow.
As of 2022, Rose is ane of three artists in residence at Sloss Metal Arts, where they will exist  spending their days furthering their knowledge and love for the craft of fe casting in the Magic  City. From 2019 to 2021, they worked for Artworks Foundry as the Production Assistant which  included; being the mold librarian, a wax chaser/pourer, a part of the pour team, a ceramic shell  technician, a mold maker, and a full general laborer on other special projects. They also worked at  The Crucible in Oakland, CA as the mold-making and foundry TA in 2021. During the summer of  2021, they completed a month-long internship at Sculpture Trails, where they installed Stripped  in the Outdoor Museum's collection. Rose is on the Steering Committee for the National  Conference for Cast Iron Art and Practices, organizing panels and presentations (2021 & 2023).  In 2019, they received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Found of American Indian Arts  where they majored in studio arts with an emphasis on bronze casting and historical chemical  darkroom techniques for photography.

Staff

Program Managing director

Lindsey is a Birmingham native and a long time administrator of diverse local arts events. She brings a stellar runway record of managerial skills coupled with cocky-motivation and discipline to the cast iron community.

Lindsey is committed to the success of Sloss Metal Arts and aims to improve business practices among employees, collaborators, and colleagues. Her Masters caste of Arts Leadership & Cultural Management from Colorado Country University guides her strategic leadership, human relationship development, creative thinking, and an entrepreneurial spirit. She has been a local arts leader for half dozen years and prides herself on her delivery to Birmingham's artistic communities.

Operations Managing director

Virginia Elliott is a sculptor, weaver, and mold maker from Cincinnati, Ohio, currently living and working in Memphis, TN. Later on receiving her BFA from the University of Cincinnati, she has completed multiple artist internship and residency programs through Josephine Sculpture Park, Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum, and Sloss Metal Arts.

Lindsey Christina

Virginia Elliott

Associate Artists

Joe McCreary

During the past 20 year period, Joe McCreary has exhibited sculpture nationally in both solo and group shows and his work has been included in several permanent collections. For the by fifteen of those years, McCreary has introduced many artists to the procedure of casting. He has taught introductory sculpture classes at The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham equally well as teaching casting and fabrication classes at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. For the past two years McCreary has been working at Birmingham's Museum of Art and holds art degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and The University of Alabama. His work deals with bug of scale, history, and humor.

Forrest Millsap began his career in metallic as an assistant for the Sloss summer youth programme outset at age nineteen. He received a bachelor of arts degree from the Academy of Alabama at Birmingham, with a concentration in sculpture and ceramics. Throughout college and immediately after, he honed his skills by working with unlike metal artists, blacksmiths, and architectural design/fabrication firms around Birmingham. Forrest now runs a small custom metal shop with his blood brother.

Forrest Millsap

Garrett Millsap

Garrett Millsap has been involved in and around the metal fine art community since an early historic period.  During his teaching at Homewood High School he spent his summers participating in the Sloss Furnace Summer Youth Apprenticeship programme where he honed his skills under pattern makers, welders, wood workers, ceramicists and other tradesman. After graduating he decided to further his didactics in other fields whilst still volunteering his time to the foundry, whether it exist helping during casting workshops or full general maintenance to the space. He worked with a custom architectural signage shop in the greater Birmingham area for the better part of a decade learning the finer details of bones high/ low voltage wiring, heavy mechanism performance and the industrial engineering of large freestanding and load bearing structures. He took these skills and experiences and traveled to Austin TX where he practical them at a high end signage and fine art visitor where they manufactured many famous icons in and around the downtown area. Since then he has returned to the Birmingham area to first upward a small custom metal and architectural blueprint company with his blood brother.

Kenneth Spivey

Kenneth comes from a family of engineers, teachers, and craftsmen. He has earned a Bachelors of Science in Art, a Masters in Education from The Academy of Montevallo, and a MFA from Savannah Collage of Art and Design (SCAD), graduating with Honors.

Kenneth talents include: metalsmithing, leather work, carpentry, hand engraving, rock carving, stained glass, acrylics, ceramics, painting, drawing, and electronics. Most of Kenneth's work is considered blacksmithing, but his skill ready allows for much broader mediums to be utilized that is oft demanded of his piece of work. Using these one-time world crafts, Kenneth produces fine art, collectible knives, jewelry, novelties, historical recreations, props, restoration works, private commissions, and installations.

Kenneth is a member of the Alabama blacksmith council, leather club, and city art quango. He was start introduced to blacksmithing while an amateur under the resident artist at Sloss Furnace, a national historic iron smelting facility in Birmingham, Alabama.

Kenneth always had the uncanny ability to empathize mechanics, which tin can definitely exist seen throughout his body of work. Most of Kenneth'southward knowledge comes from years of experience and trial and error, but over the years it has provided him with an insight that you really cannot learn by reading books, or watching instructional videos. For this reason Kenneth has started to offer classes for those who wish to tap into the vast knowledge he has accumulated over the years.

Archived Visiting Artists

Virginia Elliott

Summertime 2021

Virginia Elliott is a sculptor, weaver, and mold maker from Cincinnati, Ohio. Later on receiving her BFA from the University of Cincinnati, she completed multiple artist internship programs through Josephine Sculpture Park and Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum.

Elliott ofttimes works with handwoven cloth, exploring the intimacy of textiles. She casts fabrics to reflect traditional textures and patterns in forms reminiscent of typical textile displays. Her work re-contextualizes a material that is a centerpiece in cultural production and universal domestic intimacy.

Brighton McCormick

Autumn 2020

I am a maker. A maker of objects, images, spaces, sounds, reflections, sentences and mistakes. My heavily textile based practice incorporates handcrafted objects, 2D images, as well as sound and video typically resulting in installed environments. I often combine diverse mediums, but the resulting works alive in the domain of sculpture. Utilizing experimental casting techniques for metal and clay I fossilize memories and reflections of everyday moments and formed ideologies. Philosophical inquiry guides my studio decisions. Drawing heavily on my personal experiences of American culture I create atmospheres for the viewer to reverberate and question ideas about gild and themselves.

Wisdom of a process gained over time, development of a musculus memory, and an intimacy with a tool or material changes the source and scope of knowledge. Through this way of working and learning both the head and manus are engaged in the development of tacit knowledge. Within my practice I'm processing how the marks and memories of our personal pasts are insidious to who we go. I'm seeking to empathise how individual identity evolution has led to increasing polarization. By creating or recontextualizing furniture and other domestic objects my work reconsiders our remembered histories. Remnants of procedure and everyday items are repurposed and function as an annal of what they once were and what they once meant. In the making of craft objects historically viewed as women's work through processes typically assigned to male labor, I question both the place of skilled craft and gendered piece of work in our modern lodge

Katie Surridge

Summer 2020

I have an aversion to mod technology and so allow my interest in folklore, and stories or skills from the past to inspire my material choices, and making techniques. Later on breaking a leg falling off the summit pf my van , I was stuck on the sofa for 2 months and discovered the National school of Blacksmithing. When fixed I left London and trained here for three years… and and so began my beloved of working metal.

My contempo practice has looked at researching ancient techniques and tooling, for case a major body of piece of work has been on learning how to excerpt my ain iron from ore, to then utilize sculpturally. Im interested in decision-making the whole bicycle of making from outset to end. The idea of manipulating these skills or adapting them to make commentary on how nosotros exist today, in comparison with the past, is a key business

I have also become interested in the performative nature of using and making tools and thought of creating an art result, or action, where past people run across and share an feel through contact with the items I make. This has led me to explore ways of exhibiting the concrete act of creating work as a performance, thus blending the boundaries betwixt making and concluding piece.

A sense of humour and a genuine interest in connecting with people through my art is central. Current piece of work is involved in the formation of unusual groups or societies which act every bit a platform for people to meet and the unknown to occur. Self titling as a 'fan girl' reflects the OCD tendencies in my work and the levels of detail I am willing to go to in my process based work.

Lily Reeves

Fall 2019

Lily Reeves' sculptural work encourages emotional and physical well-being through a holistic lens of personal, societal, and environmental healing. She uses lite, space, immersive installations, and audition-participatory performance as a tool to accost spiritual chasms within gimmicky culture, working to spark wonder and openness in a earth that is increasingly disenchanted. Her aesthetic linguistic communication utilizes an uncanny and supernatural kind of magical realism, a style galvanized through growing up in the American Southeast. With her do, Reeves positions the audience equally the performer, creating a space for viewers to undergo meaningful gestures that accept an impactful, transformative upshot on the psyche. These gestures intend to counteract destructive practices that have wreaked havoc on the ecosystem, the individual, and the collective consciousness.

Reeves earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University in 2015 and her Masters in Fine Art from Arizona State Academy in Phoenix, AZ, where she graduated in Apr 2018. In 2019, Reeves was awarded the NOVA Emerging artists award from the FRESCO foundation, and the SAXE Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Glass Art guild. She currently lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama, where she runs her art and design studio, Reeves Studios, full time.

Matt Crane

Summer 2019

I am an observer a collector and builder making sculpture and objects that are informed by my environs and ideas. I call back of my studio every bit a mental and physical gymnasium where my cloth collections, be it new stock, freshly fabricated castings or previously unused and discarded metal parts are combined with ideas and worked out. I utilize materials that have a ubiquitous presence in the globe and have an inherent recyclable value. By manipulating the scale and functionality of objects of recognizable imagery and transforming them my intention is to tell stories through sculpture while exploring these shifts int the identity of objects. My constructs are simultaneously familiar yet unique and betoken to the liminal infinite of the in betwixt and of transformation. They live somewhere within the familiar and the unknown. This idea mirrors the human status and how many of us make our manner in the world sometimes plumbing equipment in while at other times continuing out.

Gwen Yen Chiu

Summer 2018

Gwen Yen Chiu is a Chicago based creative person who creates artwork that uses bathetic images of the homo form in order to critique and mimic multitudes of human being emotion, gesture and interactions. She attended the Schoolhouse of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she originally studied fashion, and apace fell in love with metals and inverse her academic class under the mentorship of Gabriel Akagawa and Daniel Matheson. She currently works under Eric Stephenson, at Lunarburn Studios in Chicago. Through her experiences with Stephenson, she honed her skills working on large public works, fabrication, welding and plumbing equipment, mold making, and all aspects of foundry.

Her work ofttimes includes the process of orchestrating different materials, including but non limited to, the casting and fabrication of metals, fabrics, plastics, technology, eccetera, which help her to comment on the feelings of displacement and 'weights' of everyday life. Through enhancing abstracted figures with fantasy prosthetics and bodily appendages, She strives to create a visual linguistic communication which addresses the strange and obscure, surrealism, and ideas on distorted psychology.

Ian Skinner

Fall 2018

In our contemporary landscape, industrial and natural elements ordinarily oppose each other through flesh's actions and they are doing then at an expedited rate in today'southward fast- paced, throw-away culture. Products of lasting quality and beauty have become less and less common in contemporary times. As the longevity of everyday objects dwindle, so does the lifespan of overlooked structures that support the infrastructures flesh has come up to rely on. Tools, bridges, water towers, and other monolithic structures are symbols of mankind's progress and used to transcend generations needing little maintenance or replacement. Yet today are ending up thrown away or scrapped at higher rates.

The abstracted forms I create are informed past these industrial structures and the natural environment, leading to a subtle commentary on the permanence and impermanence of humanity'south impact. The processes and machinery that atomic number 82 to their creation and the permanence or impermanence of their existence are inherently beautiful to me. I am left in a state of wonderment when I see natural formations or feats of humanity'south ingenuity.

Through process, materials, texture, and composition I make objects that connect with the viewer and exit them with a similar sense of dazzler and wonderment. I try to capture the feelings I find in the forces and materials that commonly oppose each other through the use of my own constructions as well every bit plant objects. I find it important to make objects that transcend traditional boundaries and division between not just the people who view my work but the materials and content within the work itself.

realewhowne.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.slossmetalarts.com/artists-staff

Share this post