26th Nov 2024—26th Nov 2025
We’re pleased to announce TEK to Tech: An Ancient Bronze Casting workshop with Helle Helsner, assisted by Róisín Foley. This two-day workshop will explore ancient bronze working techniques, beginning with participants building their own furnace which they will use to melt and cast their bronze pieces. We recommend this workshop for professional artists as there will be a focus on process and history rather than the end result.
On Day One participants will build the furnaces, carve wax models and create their moulds which will dry overnight. On Day Two the furnaces will be fired up for bronze melting and casting. After fettling, each participant will have a number of small bronzes to take home.
Helle Helsner is a visual artist and lecturer in Crawford College of Art and Design. She is currently undertaking a PhD through Burren College of Art on a MTU staff scholarship. Her research concerns materiality, memory and landscape, investigated through her practice as a sculptor and bronzecaster using the landscape and social politics surrounding the disused Copper mines in Allihies on the Beara Peninsula.
Helle graduated from CCAD in 2001 with a MA by research concerning pre historic bronze casting technology and subsequently set up her own low tech/TEK foundry enabling her to cast all her own work. She has over 23 years of casting experience and has been working in this capacity with makers such as Joseph Walsh, archaeologists including Flemming Kaul senior curator of The National Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has collaborated with Roisin Foley through experimental bronze casting and expanded drawing.
Róisín Foley graduated from CCAD in 2014 with a B.A in Fine Art, specialising in sculpture and glass casting processes. She received the Ciarán Langford memorial bursary with a 6-month sculpture studio at Backwater Artists and the Crawford College Graduate Sculpture Residency Award. Róisín has worked on large scale metal casting projects such as participating in the first two Iron Research (IRONR) Projects at the National Sculpture Factory, and commercial and fine art bronze foundry production at Kilnagleary studios as an assistant to Mick Wilkins. She regularly collaborates with Helle Helsner on experimental and earth-based forms of production, and is a fringe member of Umha Aois (Bronze Age Casting Project). In her own research she has taken residencies at The Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Allihies Copper Mines Museum and Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre.