In a warehouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a ten-truckload collection of wooden casting patterns once used in steel mills in late-19th century and early-20th century. Painter Cory Bonnet began acquiring them in 2021, and since then has worked with a multidisciplinary group of artists to create works inspired by the industrial components.
A fraction of this collection is featured in the Grohmann Museum’s latest exhibit, “Patterns of Meaning: The Art of Industry by Cory Bonnet,” which runs until April 28. It includes paintings, glassworks, ceramics and more that represent the staggering steel industry and human ingenuity.
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“Patterns are mechanical engineering at its core,” says museum director James Kieselburg. To produce steel parts, factory workers would pour molding sand over these wooden patterns in a box. When removing the pattern, the sand in the box would retain the pattern’s shape, and workers would pour molten steel into the cavity – creating the finished gear, beam, or whatever part they were creating.
Bonnet’s original goal for the patterns was preservation, but after viewing unique shape after unique shape, he wanted to do something bigger with them. “We can single these out; we can show the craftsmanship,” he says. “We can do illustrative works that narrate the story and get people drawn in immediately.”
One of Bonnet’s paintings – on a salvaged wooden piece – depicts the groundbreaking Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Pennsylvania, built in 1875 and still operational. Billows of smoke rise from a stretch of industrial strongholds and veins of railways. By sense of scale in both the subject and large canvas, Bonnet hopes to communicate a feeling of awe and grandeur.
Other works use the wooden patterns similarly to how they’re intended to be used. Ceramicist AJ Collins casted porcelain pots out of the patterns in a way that emphasizes their imperfect character – because wooden patterns were handmade, each casted steel part comes out slightly different, and steelworkers would smooth out the rough edges. With his porcelain pots, Collins instead made multiple casts and stitched pieces of them together for a final product that accentuates the rough edges.
Artwork that uses actual industrial tools isn’t common at the Grohmann, despite the museum’s focus on labor and engineering. Along with artistic group’s creations, unaltered wooden patterns are displayed throughout the exhibition.
“(The collection) just expanded our view, and it will expand the view of our patrons, to know how the reappropriation of these industrial artifacts become art, and how they can become art onto themselves,” Kieselburg says.
For Bonnet, the collection represents the power of the people to build something larger than themselves, as well as the strength of the human brain.
“There has to be a way to tap into that curiosity, and that intellect and focus,” he says. “And for a long time, manufacturing was that outlet … I think that’s the purpose of people – to create.”
For more information on the exhibition, visit the Grohmann Museum’s website.
