We spoke with the artist Gregory Ryan about his practice and approach to bronze casting.
Gregory Ryan combines an artistic and philosophical vision with the inventive use of new technologies, mathematical algorithms, and age-old bronze casting techniques. He acquired this expertise over sixteen years working in an industrial bronze foundry outside Paris after graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts. Ryan casts all his pieces in his own foundry. His work aims to celebrate and preserve both nature and the traditions of bronze casting. Deeply fascinated by the complexity and beauty of the natural world, he seeks to reveal what lies beneath the surface of things, suggesting a contemporary vision of bronze as a medium that carries memory and permanence.
Q1: What impact do you think scale has on your work?
There's a funny thing that came out where evidently people are more attracted to larger pieces , and they garner you know, bigger prices, obviously. I got into doing monumental pieces just because I found myself working more with architects for site-specific bespoke projects, and when you're dealing with material like bronze, you know it's good to have a commission, as opposed to just saying, okay, I'm going to cast this big thing, and let's see. It's not just a question of the time, but also you're investing certainly more money into making the pieces than would be if you're doing watercolors, or even painting. I've worked with an awful lot of architects, and I think a good architect understands the importance of having an artist who understands the materiaI. I've also worked with interior architects. I mean, I've done big projects with Peter Marino, Thierry Despond, I’ve designed the cast in bronze for facades of Harry Winstons, and so that's kind of how I ended up doing a lot of the bigger pieces. That said, bronze certainly tends to work very well in smaller, delicate objects.
Q2: Could you please describe some of the techniques you use?
I actually do both types of bronze casting for large pieces that aren't too complex in terms of undercuts, that would be sand casting, an ancient technique. Which existed well before lost wax, which is the other technique. Sand casting was taking place in the Bronze Age, over 3000 years ago. Today it's slightly changed though, we still use natural sand for smaller pieces. This is a very fine sand, it's almost like a clay that has oils and bonding agents, but you can't do big scale things with that, so at the big foundry where I work, we have a sand that's bonded with essentially a resin and a catalyzer, like fiberglass, and you can then do these enormous pieces that you put in these big steel frames, what you call châssis. Take the print with this sand, it hardens, flip it over, take the print of the other side, open it, take your piece out. You carve in all the channels, you know, the runners and risers, in english, les attaques et les coulées in french, the entonnoir which is the funnel that brings the bronze in, or in different cases aluminum. That’s the technique we use for big pieces. For more delicate things we do lost wax, and that's something where you create a mold, and then another model in wax, and then with that wax, you attach it to a tree (in reference to Cracked Earth Samburu) with these little sprues that come out, you put it into a big steel cylinder, you fill the cylinder with a very special plaster called refractory plaster, you put that into an oven at 800 degrees for about three days, take it out, turn it over, and all that space that was occupied by the wax now is a negative space, it's empty. You then fill that with the bronze, then begins a lot of the other work: the ébargbage, ciselage, which is cutting off the piece from the tree, the metal chasing, polishing patinas. An awful lot of work goes into making the piece. I don't know any, or at least not too many ‘bronze’ artists who actually have a true idea of what goes into making the piece, if they have the funds to cast work, they take it to a foundry. People don't know how to fix their car either and they take it to a garage, it's sort of the same relationship, but don't call yourself a mechanic just because you drive a car.
Q3: What first led you to work with bronze?
It was completely unintentional. All throughout Les Beaux-Arts I was doing a lot of big pieces in steel, a lot of metal work, steel work, welding, all of that. When I left Les Beaux-Arts, I was working in a dance company and also in an industrial music group, so I was on tour a lot but I was looking for a studio space, and one of my friends said, "I know this guy who owns this big bronze foundry in the south of Paris, maybe he can help you out” so I went down and this foundry, which no longer exists unfortunately. It was really something out of a Zola novel, quite extraordinary. On some days you couldn't see from one end of the factory to the other because of all the smoke and dust and steam and all that. The guy there gave me a whole part of the back of the factory, right next to these lathes, these enormous machines to smooth metal. At that point I was not at all interested in bronze, it wasn't my thing, but after a while I just got completely enamored with the art. We had a very big chantier, sand workshop, that did a lot of artwork and big pieces, so bit by bit I kind of paid attention, and I was taken under the wing of one of these old boys who actually had won the Meilleur Ouvrier de France. So I learned the trade for over 16 years there, I think the longest apprenticeship ever. What’s interesting is that it wasn't just learning how to make molds and models, it was casting, so I learned a lot about alloys. Alloys are the mixing of metals for example bronze is primarily copper and tin, brass is copper and zinc, but if you add 2% aluminum and some silicium, it changes the properties completely. There's a lot of alchemy there, and it's really a cool art to learn that. We also learned how to do patinas, anyway, the whole nine yards. It was a really interesting place to learn. I did some huge pieces there. I did one piece for Berlin, when they re-did the whole Friedrichstraße, and cast a piece that was about 3 meters 50 wide by 14 meters tall, cast it in four sections, and each mold - there were four of them - each mold weighed 35 tons.That was the scale I could work on. The thing is when you're making that stuff, it's really not great for you, because -especially when it's hot- the catalyzer is hydrochloric acid. So you're in the summer, in crazy heat, under a glass roof and you have to be on top of this thing, stomping it down with your boots in this hydrochloric acid vapor. You’d cough your lungs out for weeks.
Q4: What is your process for getting started?
That's a question that you can't really have an answer to, because it's a long-term organic process. In a way you've spent years and years developing a vocabulary of your own language, it's not like a secret language, because as soon as you make a piece, it's out there, but it should come naturally. The thing that I always say is to have a notebook, don't ever walk out the door without a little notebook in your back pocket and a sharp pencil because you can be looking at a brick wall, and then something might come into your head. Another thing that is most important is to go and see good art, you have to live in that ether of something that's purer than what you see every day. You really have to be disciplined in terms of going to galleries and seeing stuff, and also being able to be judgmental and realize that 90% of the stuff out there is absolute rubbish, and you're allowed to say that's just rubbish There's something pure in art, and I think you have to live in that world as much as you can. I have piles of notebooks of these little voices that are like ‘please make me, make me, make me” and the question isn't having the ideas, coming up with stuff, the question is finding the time to actually do them. You actually already have a warehouse of pieces already in your mind that you can go back and visit, and then one day you're like, okay, let's make this one but over that time it's refined… the pieces are constantly refined. I'm actually working on some furniture pieces right now, and they're on my mind all the time. Every day I'll go back to them, because they nag at you like unborn children and they want to come into the world, and it's incredibly frustrating.
Q5: What do you want people to see or notice when viewing your pieces?
Every piece is quite different, to really explain every piece you have to sit down and look at it. Like Rio Tinto, it's like looking at the earth's mantle from underneath… and Rio Tinto being the biggest copper mining company in the world. For the other one there in the entrance, Mother Earth, the cracked earth was taken in Kenya while I was there. The idea is to add a little bit more to it than just texture, there's more to it, yeah. The piece I talked about in Berlin, was incredibly big and rough looking, but incredibly delicate at the same time. It was peeled up in a wave, and I bought up an entire street one summer that they were redoing in Paris, Rue du Maire in the third (arrondissement), I bought something like 20 tons of paving stones and they're Napoleonic era and the guy sold me the stones. And so, for the piece in Berlin, you peeled away in bronze the kind of the skin of the earth, and behind it, underneath was almost like an archeological site of Alexanderplatz, as if you're peeling away the history of Berlin. So as I said the texture is important but it’s a vehicle. Another project I have coming up has to do with when I went and cast the beachhead at Omaha Beach in Normandy.My dad was in the 101st Airborne and he landed on Omaha Beach. When the tide runs out there, it's a big tide, it creates these ripples in the sand that mimic the water on the surface. I cast those patterns, but once again the patterns are part of a bigger story, freezing a moment in time. The idea of ephemeral and bronze is also very interesting, a series that I was working on called L’éphémère dans L’éternel (the ephemeral in the eternal) it was all about freezing in bronze, which is this wonderful material that doesn't change over time. Getting back to the alloy, it's an alloy that is entropy-free, it just doesn't fall apart, it doesn't rust, yes it'll patina, but in a century it will still look like it was cast yesterday. The idea with the relationship of time, where you can actually freeze a moment as ephemeral as water, that's really the crux right there of the work. The problem is I just don’t have enough time to make all of the pieces that are worth making.
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Responses have been paraphrased for clarity.