I take the same train twice a year, always the early one, always with a leather folder of drawings pressed flat against my knees like I'm afraid the ideas will slip out if I don't hold them still. Nobody meets me at the station on the other end. I just walk, past a bakery that's usually still pulling its shutters up, down a street I could probably map from memory by now, to a building with no sign on it at all — just a buzzer with a strip of masking tape and a name half worn off. This is where the wax becomes gold, or doesn't.
I didn't choose this particular foundry because it was convenient. It's a ninety-minute train and then a walk, when there are casters twenty minutes from my own studio who would happily take the work. I chose it because of the man who runs it, who has been doing this since before I was born, and who looks at every one of my wax models the way you'd look at a letter someone handed you to read out loud — carefully, a little slowly, checking for words that might trip him up before he commits to saying them. He doesn't flatter me. The first time I brought him the wax for what would become the Sierra ring, he turned it under the light for what felt like an unbearably long time and then said only, this will be hard to get right, in a tone that wasn't a complaint so much as a promise to try. I have learned to want that reaction more than praise.
The part nobody tells you about casting, before you've watched it happen a dozen times, is how little control you have once the wax goes into the flask. Weeks of adjusting a curve by half a millimeter, and then you hand it over and it disappears into a process that is mostly heat, and gravity, and metal finding its way into a cavity you can no longer see or reach. I still stand near the door during the pour, even though I've been asked not to more than once, because sitting in the front room felt worse — like waiting for news about something you can't do anything about, except this way I can at least hear it happening.
I rode a rented bicycle back into the city after this last trip instead of taking the train straight home, because I wasn't ready yet to be back in my own studio with my own doubts. I went the long way, past shopfronts closing for the evening, past a woman walking a dog that had stopped to stare at absolutely nothing, and let the ride do what the train out had done in reverse — turn the nervousness into something closer to ordinary tiredness. The castings were good. Not perfect, one had a seam I'll have to talk to him about next time, but good, and mine again, in a way they hadn't been for the three days they sat somewhere I couldn't watch them.
People ask me sometimes what part of this job feels most like craft to me, expecting me to say the sketching, or the polishing, or the moment a design finally clicks into place on paper. It's this, actually. The waiting by a door I'm not supposed to stand near, trusting a process I don't fully control, and finding out — the way you find out about most things worth doing — only after it's already too late to change your mind.
— Arina
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