Photo courtesy of Randi Hubert Kenny Jensen taps molten iron from a furnace. Jensen was one of the southwest Minnesota crew members who traveled from Lamberton to Alabama to perform at a national cast iron conference.

A group of artists and metalworkers have been getting together to make cast iron art in southwest Minnesota for more than 20 years. This spring, they took their furnace on the road — performing as guest artists at a national gathering of iron casters.

Members of the Lamberton Hot Iron Crew took part in the National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art and Practices (NCCCIAP), which was held April 1-5 at the historic Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama. The conference brought together artists, educators and professionals from around the U.S.

A crew of people, including Larry, Clayton, Mike and Charlie Hubert, and Kenny Jensen, transported an iron-melting furnace from Lamberton to Birmingham for NCCCIAP. Together with a group of featured artists from around the Midwest, they took part in a featured performance at the conference.

Clayton Hubert said he first got interested in cast iron art when he was a student at Southwest Minnesota State University. Hubert said he attended an iron pouring event together with SMSU professor Jim Swartz, John Sterner and other students.

“It was like, ‘This is so cool,'” Hubert said. “I was hooked.”

Around 2003 or 2004, Clayton and his father Larry Hubert started building their own iron furnace. They went on to hold an iron pour outside Lamberton’s historic blacksmith shop, and from there the event became a local festival: Hot Iron Days.

“In doing that, we met great artists from the Upper Midwest,” Clayton Hubert said. The Lamberton Hot Iron Crew eventually caught the attention of other cast iron artists on a national level. This spring, they applied to NCCCIAP and got in, Hubert said.

Casting iron sculptures can be a spectator event as much as a production process, Hubert said.

“There’s a performance to the whole thing,” he said. Sparks fly, there’s molten metal, and people are coordinating their movements to work together. “It becomes such a dance.”

The Hot Iron Crew’s conference performance, titled “Midwest POURformance: Waves of Change,” featured artists from around the Upper Midwest.

“We spent the last six months planning out what we were going to do,” Hubert said. “You don’t really get a test run on some of this.”

The group’s performance included casting items that would spark like fireworks, beating on hot iron like percussion instruments, and about 300 pounds of molten iron flowing down a slope.

It was exciting to be part of the conference, Hubert said.

“Over 1,000 people watch this,” he said.

But one of the best parts of NCCCIAP was getting to meet other iron casters from around the country, Hubert said.

“Standing around the bonfire afterwards is part of it for me,” he said. “There’s all these ideas being shared.”