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Hot Iron 26: UTA at Mesalands Iron Pour
A group of faculty, students, and an alumnus from the UTA Art and Art History Department traveled to the annual Hot Iron Pour Workshop
Over spring break, a group of faculty, students, and an alumnus from the UTA Art and Art History Department traveled to Mesalands Community College for its annual Hot Iron Pour Workshop – an intensive, hands-on week-long event centered on large-scale iron casting that gathered artists from across the country. We spoke with members of the UTA group about why they participated and what they took away.
“Something you can’t replicate alone”
For faculty member Fernando Johnson, the draw is fundamentally communal:
“Participating in this workshop offers a vital opportunity to engage with a dedicated community of makers – something difficult to replicate in a solo studio. Working alongside others exposes me to new techniques and perspectives. It allows me to refine methodologies that bridge an ancient, vanishing tradition with contemporary innovation, and bring that knowledge back to my students and my own practice.”
Adjunct assistant professor Michael Scogin echoes that sentiment:
“Iron pours are one of the few truly community-based practices in sculpture. And that community is why I keep coming back.”
Graduate student Lucas Fitzpatrick embarked on the journey with curiosity and left with something closer to immersion:
“I heard about it from Fernando Johnson and immediately committed. I’d done foundry pours before, but never an iron pour. It felt like the perfect way to spend spring break: making work, breaking iron, and culminating in a pour on the final day.
On pour day, everyone came together as a community, working to ensure everything was completed. My graduate student colleague Sitar Balaban and I spent most of the day assisting Donnie King in repairing and preparing his blast furnace, which ended up being my favorite part of the experience. I am especially drawn to systems and industrial processes, and it was incredible to absorb so much knowledge through hands-on work in such a short time.”
Mass, speed, and afterlife
The scale and numbers around this event are staggering: Michael Scogin guesstimates that more than 3,200 pounds of molten iron had been poured during the event. The material itself carries a quiet history.
“The iron is all reclaimed,” Scogin explains. “A lot of it comes from the old Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells. Radiators and bathtubs make up most of what we break. It’s not perfectly sustainable, but the wax is all recycled, the iron reclaimed, and for something at this scale the ecological impact of the furnaces is negligible comparatively.”
Material Thinking and Future Work
As scrap becomes new structure, domestic objects are broken down and recast, their previous lives folded into new forms and visual language. For Lucas Fitzpatrick, this experience reframed his relationship to material:
“I work primarily with glass, and this deepened my understanding and independency of both materials. Glass and iron operate at similarly high temperatures (2100°F), both are strong yet brittle, and can fracture under stress. Where there is glass, there is iron, and vice versa. Overall, it was an incredibly rewarding experience: physically demanding, collaborative, and full of insight into how iron can function within my practice, both as a tool and as a material.”
More Than a Workshop
Despite being hosted by a small college, the Hot Iron Pour workshop functions like a temporary ecosystem. Artists return year after year and roles blur between student, technician, and collaborator. At its core, it is about the continuity of knowledge, labor, and shared experience. Or, as Scogin puts it:
“Iron pours are one of the few community-based practices we have in sculpture, and that community is why I keep coming back.”
In a field often defined by individual authorship, the iron pour insists on the process of making as dependency and exchange, where heat is passed from one set of hands to another. The group returned to Texas carrying new ideas with them, focused on material ecologies and the ethics of collaboration and continuity.