Del Harrow

Ever since working in a metal fabrication shop before graduate school I’ve been drawn to the material Aluminum.  Its light weight and tensile strength offer a counterpoint to the density of clay.  Aluminum is corrosion resistant and soft enough to be cut and machined using standard woodworking tools.  Its sanded surface has a luminous sheen, beautiful in the way sanded plywood can be beautiful, a kind of modernist aesthetic of practical industrial simplicity.  

In 2010, for my contribution to the group exhibition “Overthrown” at the Denver Art Museum, I used 1/4” sheets of aluminum to make a large pedestal and to frame a tile wall.   The pedestal was made with a technique I learned at the fabrication shop – brass screws, cut and sanded flush with the surface, leaving small gold circles at the connection points, an elegant attachment detail.  

For exhibitions at Haw Contemporary, In 2014 and 2015 I made 2 sculptures using thin sheets of aluminum that were water jet cut and then connected with small rivets.  In some ways this was simply a practical solution for engaging a large gallery space with a limited shipping budget – the pieces packed into a few small boxes and were then fabricated on site into large sculptural volumes.  

In the last few years I’ve been recycling and casting aluminum cans with a simple propane furnace outside my studio.  

Aluminum is refined from the mineral Bauxite – first extracted from the soil of the Brazilian Amazon.  The process of extraction and refinement is both energy intensive and ecologically damaging but once refined Aluminum is nearly endlessly recyclable.  

I think of these cast aluminum fragments as a kind of object/allegory of our relationship with physical materials and material culture broadly.  A small reminder that these beautiful and useful materials – endless recycled, sampled and borrowed – come to us from the skin of our planet, and often hold complex and layered histories of theft, violence, and inequity.

This is a short video I made a few years back, a part of the Ceramic Materials Atlas project, talking about the mining and refinement of Aluminum.