In 2006 I received a commission from Submeta to create a bronze for the Beckman Institute at Urbana-Champaign.  This is a sterling institution with a fine sculpture collection, and I was honored to be asked.  Also a bit alarmed, since I don't usually work that large!

Not many of my sculptures are suitable for bronze casting, and from the three or four options available we quickly settled on Flow design.  The location was to be on the axis of the main building at Beckman, in a narrow area between two larger spaces, the twofold symmetry of this piece fit well.

I began by making a 3D CAD model of the piece, with several changes from the smaller bronze version I'd originally made.  We figured out early that the casting would be roughly 30 inches tall.  The new wavy texture brings out the form, and also reduce the thickness and weight of the bronze.  I began talks with Steve at Reinmuth Bronze, a superb artist and caster who has more experience with mathematical sculpture than anyone else I know of, and we soon agreed on method and budget, as well as working together to design a fabricated steel base.  Steve doesn't use CAD software, plus he's in Oregon, so we emailed and faxed lots of sketches.
 

The design as a whole isn't moldable, so I broke it down into simpler modules.
 

I had one example of each module printed in plaster, on a large-format ZCorp machine.
 

These went to the foundry, where a rubber mold was made of each.
 

Wax duplicates of each module were made and carefully hand finished. 
 

The wax parts were dipped in ceramic slurry, dusted with sand, and dipped again to make ceramic shell molds.  These are fired to harden them and remove the wax, to get ready for the bronze pour...