In late March, a unique workshop brought together the Arts et Métiers campus Arts et Métiers and the École supérieure d’art to showcase the projects of 10 young artists, combining artistic creation with technical expertise.
The students from the École supérieure d’art arrived with objects, ideas, and often unexpected approaches, blending their artistic sensibility with experimentation.
“They faced the same technical manufacturing constraints as engineering students in choosing processes, preparing molds, and carrying out the casting and finishing,” notes Prof. Féthi Ben Ouezdou, campus director.
Over the course of five days, these students, fully immersed in the process, discovered every stage of creating pieces in bronze, brass, and aluminum.
This collaborative effort drew on the expertise of five teachers and engineers from three workshops: the campus foundry, the Metal Workshop, and the Volume Workshop at the École supérieure d’art.
They attended an introductory lecture by Marie Bedel, a lecturer and researcher in foundry technology, on foundry techniques, followed by a session on the various stages of part preparation, from pattern design to the creation of molds and castings.
Then the casting sessions followed one after another. With the help of Julien Nègre, a foundry design engineer, the parts were then removed from the molds, deburred, and patinated in the foundry workshop.
They experimented with several pre-casting molding techniques using wax and polystyrene models: lost-wax casting, green sand or chemical-setting sand casting, lost-foam casting, open-mold casting in refractory plaster, and more.
Each participant created one or more pieces of varying sizes, which will soon be incorporated into their works as part of their training.
" It’s exciting to see our ideas take shape in the material. We start with an artistic vision, but we discover a whole technical world that transforms the way we create “recalls Anna, one of the students.”
Barbara Sarte, director of the École supérieure d’art, noted in her acceptance speech that “ Collaboration on equal terms between an artist and a craftsperson is something that can be learned, which is why initiatives like this workshop are so meaningful. "
