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Art Through Industry – Supplying a state-of-the-art blast room for renowned British sculptor.
Client
Hexham Studio Casting LLP (Sir Antony Gormley)
Location
Northern England
Brief
Design, manufacture, and install a comprehensive grit blasting room to process and treat sculptures.
Background
In 2024, Airblast was contacted by Sir Antony Gormley, a renowned British artist and sculptor known for his exploration of the human body and its relationship to space and nature. He is widely acclaimed for his public artworks and installations, his most famous works being the Angel of the North, Another Place, and Event Horizon, a multi-part installation that appeared at Madison Square Garden and Sao Paulo.
Some of his most famous works include “Angel of the North,” a massive steel sculpture located in Gateshead, England, and “Another Place,” which consists of numerous life-sized cast iron figures spread along Crosby Beach near Liverpool. Gormley’s innovative and thought-provoking installations have made him one of his generation’s most significant contemporary artists. He was knighted in 2014 for his services to the arts.
Mr Gormley was interested in installing a new blast room at his workshop to process his sculptures, especially those made of steel and ferrous materials. His previous facility became maintenance intensive, resulting in inefficiencies and becoming a hindrance rather than an asset.
The Solution
Sir Anthony’s steel pieces are often presented with a rusty finish. Gormley’s approach to rusting adds layers of meaning and complexity to his sculptures, aligning with his broader artistic goals. Many of his pieces are abrasive-blasted to remove unwanted process marks, but importantly, to retain others deemed desirable by the artist and to ensure a more even final finish.
After a consultation, we identified the problems with the Foundry’s previous facility and optimised their surface treatment process for better efficiency.
Abrasive recovery
To improve the operational throughput of our client’s Foundry, we opted for an automated recovery solution inside the blast room – the sweeping abrasive recovery floor. This floor almost entirely negates operator intervention in abrasive clean-up, meaning less time lost to manual abrasive recovery.
Abrasive separator
An integral part of the abrasive reclamation system, the dynamic abrasive reclassifier ensures the repeatability of the process finish, ensuring abrasive size and quality are consistent throughout the operation.
Interior lighting
To ensure great lighting conditions inside the grit blasting room, the blast room’s ceiling is lined with wall-to-wall blast-proof LED lighting units.
Dust extraction
Airblast employed a novel technique to remove airborne particulates as quickly and efficiently as possible to ensure virtually dustless blasting during operation. The grit blasting room’s internal atmosphere is constantly held at a slight negative pressure, with air travelling from high to low. The travel of air works with gravity to channel airborne debris and dust to intakes connected to ducting to be captured inside the dust collector.
Blast room loading and handling
The Foundry’s pieces can be of varying weights and sizes, so to ensure easy handling of workpieces in and out of the blast room, a bespoke loading system was installed to cater to the varied artworks to be processed in the blast room.
Achieving the finish
Steel surfaces rust more quickly when abrasive blasted because the process creates a rough surface, removing any protective coatings or passivation layers. This increased surface area, exposure, and potential micro-cracks and trapped moisture make the steel more susceptible to rusting. This is the process that Airblast usually races against when designing its facilities. Most modern advanced coatings require surface cleaning to a set standard, typically SA 2, 2.5 & 3, while creating a surface profile measured on the RA or RZ scale. Besides this, they will also require a surface to be coated within a fixed time for blast cleaning to take place. In this case, the accelerated corrosion that is usually avoided is, in fact, embraced.
The Result
Airblast considers working for the Sir Anthony team a huge honour. We have enjoyed the process of bringing our experience to bear on what is undoubtedly one of the more unusual deployments of one of our blast rooms.
The team are very satisfied with the new blasting facility, its excellent. Its significantly cut-down processing times.
Andrew, Studio Manager
