Madison Ohio, where I grew up, was founded on iron. Specifically, a town with a different name was built on the exact location of Madison to extract bog iron ore from the local landscape and refine it into wrought iron. Business boomed, and in the 1830s the town was bigger than Cleveland. By the 1850s, however, the bogs had been picked clean, and the town was abandoned. The buildings on the port were dismantled or washed away, the houses collapsed and rotted in the woods. To my knowledge, there is only one house still standing from the original settlement. They did leave behind evidence of their labor, though. In the production of iron, slag is generated, and to clear space, it was thrown into the lake, or into the bogs from which the ore had initially been extracted. Whenever I walk along the beach in my town, I am confronted with weathered globules, black and blue slag that bubbled and flowed like lava into the lake.

To commemorate this material action, I water cast wax, pouring it into a bucket and allowing it to cool into bubbles and tendrils. I amassed a group of these blobs and cast them together in bronze. It will sit in a bog in my town, waiting patiently, perhaps for iron hunters to come again.