Students from the California State University, Northridge bronze casting class curated a metal casting show last week to show their artwork to students, friends and family.

The event titled “Trials by Fire” was a metal casting show that featured the final sculptures the students created. The final products took up all the fall semester, where students often had to stay late to work on their pieces.

“This was definitely the most laborious class I’ve ever taken,” said art major Melissa Termini, one of the students who showed off her sculpture in the showcase.

In order to create these sculptures, students had the opportunity to learn and use different techniques of sculpting.

Teaching the bronze class was professor Kari Campbell, who has been teaching at CSUN for about 12 years and shared what the process is like.

“The students come up with the ideas and can decide to sculpt it out of wax directly or take a found object and make a mold out of that. When they have the wax that is all finished, there are different ways they can make a mold of that wax. A lot of these pieces were dipped in a slurry (ceramic shell) that you have to dip in multiple times, wait for it to dry and once it reaches a certain thickness you can burn out the wax to have a hollow mold. That material is then strong enough to pour the metal into,” Campbell said.

For some students, the process of pouring metal was new and exciting to them.

“This was my first time pouring metal, it was a super cool process. The best part was the group of peers and the instructors. Their expertise in the subject was very helpful,” said CSUN alumnus Gavin Woods.

Although laborious, Termini said her bronze community helped her out and she couldn’t have done it all alone.

“Even though we all made and designed our own pieces, we heavily relied on each other to get things done. We couldn’t have done it without each other, the highlight of this was the community we created,” Termini said.