Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA -- Three thousand degrees of heat gives a whole new meaning to the term "fiery furnace."

At that temperature, a metal-melting furnace belches gravel-sized sparks, shimmers the air 30 feet in any direction. Before getting near it, metal workers at Saturday's first-ever Iron Pour, held at the Alaska Museum of Transportation and Industry, strapped on chaps, hard hats and goggles, slid into leather boots and gloves.

Five hours after they fired up the furnace -- or "couplette," as event organizer Pat Garley called it -- iron was liquid. Although several volunteers had attended a pour in Wiseman last week and will attend the final pour in Kenai today, they still practiced their steps while holding a red-hot ladle.

When you're handling liquid metal, there's no room for a mistake.

Three lines of black molds -- some of them crafted from Jim Creek sand and epoxy -- waited an infusion.

Orchestrating it all was Garley, who occasionally used his gloved hands to pack the couplette with several charges of layered iron and coke.

Heat hissed in exhalation as it consumed car parts and boiler pieces that Garley had collected since breakup.

Anticipating the pour were a dozen artists who mingled with blacksmiths, glass blowers and a rock carver demonstrating their crafts while waiting for their metal to go molten. Most, like John Gray of Palmer, whose molds were for palm-sized commemorative frying pans, created functional art. Others, like Laura West of Fresno, Calif., went abstract.

West brought along a mold she made that, when cast, should yield about 40 bellybuttons.

They're all of different folks she knows who volunteered to have cold cream, cheesecloth and plaster of Paris spread on their stomach.

The result is a white, wrinkly nugget free of lint. They're mostly innies; West said her outies are the coolest.

She even has a cast of a rare double bellybutton, from a woman in California.

When they're finished, West encases them in clay and displays them in natural tableaus, which she photographs.

"It's an intimate and ignored part of the body," West said of her bellybutton fetish.

Her bellybuttons took up a small part of the 820 pounds of iron transformed to art.

Garley said he's looking to the pour in Kenai today and the group has plans for the Mat-Su Borough next year.

The pour was part of the "Art on Fire" festival.

"We're hoping that 'Art on Fire' will become an annual event," Garley said.

Find Melodie Wright online at adn.com/contact/mwright or call 352-6721

FOR MORE INFORMATION

• The final "Art on Fire" -- dubbed the Kenai River of Fire Iron Pour -- is part of Kenai's Fourth of July celebration and held from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today at the Conoco Phillips ice arena, 9775 Kenai Spur Highway.

• Online: Read more about the iron pour idea: arcticirontrail.blogspot.com/2008/05/iron-trail-to-arctic.html

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