I was so grateful to be chosen for the inaugural Crucible Artist Residency in Ōamaru in 2024. In my proposal I wrote about Boudicca, the Iceni warrior queen, who learnt how to cast iron from her father. I read about her in Manda Scotts’s incredible 4 book series, and it awakened a fire in me to learn more about these ancient ancestors, their practices and my connections to them. As an artist, I find out and research through making, so when I saw the residency, it seemed like the perfect place to learn about this intense form of transformation.
Over 3 months I cast my soft pieces of sculpture into cast iron. We didn’t know if it was possible – we learnt together that soft really is stronger than hard – the flexibility of the pieces meant they could be gently eased from the sand, allowing their complexity to be cast. I adore the metaphor of this – for our lives to be as complex as they are without breaking, they also need to stay soft and flexible. The works are weighty, pulling like claws the gifted leather from a local artist to the earth. They are heavy, but the wool plaits, made from found and gifted red wool, are strong enough to hold them in space. Working together these solid pieces, relics of fire and transformation, hang held well by softness, by delicate red threads.
My work always incorporates relationships, and this residency gave me new artist friends who helped me learn about materials and gifted me scraps to use, and the amazing foundry workers taught me how to work with fire.
Large drawings made throughout the residency showed the moments of transformation, smoke, of a body allowing change to happen through it. Through the door the energy flowed- red lines poured over and down a staircase. The drama and glamour of red brought the energy and pooling of life force, the heat that enables change, weighted by a solid form, a mis-pour, functional object become art, acknowledging the beauty in the unpredictable process of making.
Ngā mihi ki te maunga Aoraki, ki te moana Arai-te-uru, ki te awa Waitaki. Ngā mihi nui ki Te Iwi o te rohe nei, Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha. Ngā mihi nui ki te mana whenua, Te whanui o Moeraki. Ngā mihi ki Te Whare Koa marae for welcoming me in, and Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kai Tahu), for blessing this exhibition.
Siân Quennell Torrington’s work made on the Crucible Residency in 2024 was subsequently curated by Dr Chelsea Nichols and Milly Mitchell-Anyon into the exhibition ‘A Wing and a Prayer’, at The Dowse Art Museum, Te Awa Kairangi, Lower Hutt. https://dowse.org.nz/exhibitions-and-events/exhibitions/2025/wing-and-a-prayer
Exhibition wall text by Dr Chelsea Nichols and Milly Mitchell-Anyon:
“Siân Quennell Torrington’s sculptures rise like relics from a forgotten mythology — the calcified ribs of past selves, the claws of crones. They’re not soft or yielding but dense and heavy, held aloft with braided red wool and leather scraps like skin tangled with bone.
Created during the inaugural Crucible Artist Residency at Ōamaru’s historic ironworks, Quennell Torrington spent three months experimenting with how to cast soft materials into solid iron. They also scavenged molten drips, cast-offs, and sculptural lumps from the sand of the foundry floor, tenderly cradling them in nests of unravelled jumpers. They saw in them not waste, but the traces of labour and heat; the poetry of what had overflowed, what had been too much.
Installed as a sacred circle, the molten fragments form an altar to transformation — the spiritual and physical changes our bodies endure as we age. “To transform,” they say, “is to move from one state to another. And what is in between? Heat. Fire. Flow.”
From discarded remnants, Quennell Torrington builds a shrine to faith — not in gods, but in the dangerous beauty and divine alchemy of becoming.”
Siân’s work is available through OREX in Auckland, and for studio-based works, sculptures and visits please contact her directly:
Email: siantorrington@gmail.com
Website: https://allmeaningisthelineyoudraw.wordpress.com
(Photos by Mark Tantrum: http://marktantrum.com)