Lotus Mirror

The Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc was not built for art. It was built for production — for the kind of precision components that end up inside machines, vehicles, and defense systems. The workforce there shapes molten metal into any geometry imaginable, then machines it to spec. They move fast, with professional focus, and they don't stop for just anyone.

Until now.

For the better part of a year, I was the strange presence in the background of all that. An artist working in a place not designed for artists, making a large-scale sculpture rooted in ancient Chinese cosmology, Buddhist philosophy, and an obsession with the nature of perception itself.

In the pattern shop, Wyatt and I built mold boxes by hand: lightweight, on casters, and ambitious in scale. With Aaron and Jersey, I made petal sand molds that weighed hundreds of pounds, stealing time between production runs with forms so massive you could climb inside them. Whenever the maintenance crew had an open table, I'd set up welding jigs to align castings for assembly, using angle finders and precision measurement tools to verify everything before bringing separate castings together with Cory, tacking them in place and finishing the final weldments. Then came the bronze mirror blanks with Robert: cast, then painstakingly hand-finished against an indicator plate until the surface was dead flat. A true mirror, made entirely by hand.

All of this while navigating the constant, controlled chaos of a working foundry in full swing.

I didn't know if it would work. There were moments when I was almost certain it wouldn't.

WHERE IT STARTED

This project — one rooted in self-reflection and perception — began during a low point. I had stopped making motorcycle castings as my primary source of income, and the years of hard-won self-sufficiency I had built around my own creative work had quietly run dry. Demand faded.

I found myself without a clear path forward, uncertain how to re-enter the job market, and aware that significant changes were coming whether I was ready for them or not.

It was in that space that the idea took shape. I decided to create a sculpture that could serve as a tool for looking inward — a way of examining my own habits, behaviors, and temperament honestly enough to understand where things had gone wrong. Not as an exercise in regret, but as a way of mapping the pitfalls clearly enough to avoid them next time. If my years making motorcycle covers never generated lasting economic value, I could at least recycle what I had learned into something that taught me about who I am. That, too, would be worth something — for me, and perhaps for others navigating their own version of the same uncertainty.

The decision to make a metal mirror was, on the surface, as straightforward as it sounds — a polished metal surface reflects light, and in doing so, reflects you back to yourself. That was exactly what I needed. To see myself clearly. Not a flattering version, not a convenient one, but an honest image that held both my failures and my successes in full view. The mirror wasn't just an aesthetic choice — it was a deliberate act. A way of training myself to look at my own life differently, shake old cycles, and grow psychologically toward a new way of living.

RESEARCH PHASE

With the mirror concept locked in, it was time to actually make one. Polishing metal to a reflective finish wasn't unfamiliar territory — I had worked through hundreds of motorcycle covers over the years, so achieving a mirror-like surface wasn't what concerned me. It was the aesthetic direction for the frame that was less certain, and for that, I needed a serious reference point.

I reached out to the Field Museum in Chicago, which houses an extensive collection of antique metal mirrors, hoping to find it. Curator Jamie Kelly was generous enough to walk me through over 200 mirrors from across Asia.

I had already been researching TLV mirrors — a category of ancient Chinese bronze mirrors, mostly from the Han Dynasty, named for the T, L, and V shapes that appear as recurring motifs on their decorated backs. That research led me to Berthold Laufer, a Field Museum curator who was almost single-handedly responsible for acquiring many of these objects during a period of profound political upheaval in China — a moment when a significant piece of that culture's past was at genuine risk of disappearing entirely.

Laufer recognized that imperial China in the 1890s was on the verge of collapse, and that revolution and modernization would soon erase much of what had survived for centuries. He made it his mission to collect what he could before it was gone. Over two expeditions in the early 1900s, he traveled alone through a country in open conflict — moving through regions ravaged by bandits and anti-western militias with a single donkey cart, acquiring artifacts directly from locals, and carrying them back to be preserved. Many of those objects eventually found a home in institutions like the Field Museum, which in all likelihood protected them from destruction during events like the Cultural Revolution some forty years later.

And there I was, standing in front of them — trying to read the decorative language pressed into the backs of those castings. There were mirrors large and small, some with portraits, some with characters, some with Buddhist influences. But I kept returning to the cast bronze TLV mirrors of the Han Dynasty, made some 2,000 years ago.

The iconography on their backs isn't decorative in any modern sense. It's cosmological — a mapped understanding of the universe. Cardinal directions, the measurement of time via the seasons and constellations, and the relationship between the earth and the heavens. These weren't artistic flourishes. They were a visual reminder to track cycles, recognize patterns, and be aware of what is larger than yourself. For ancient humans, if you could track the sun and the stars, you knew when to plant, when to prepare, and when to rest. Understanding the world outside yourself meant a better chance of surviving it — and that knowledge was considered important enough to emboss onto the back of what was also a precision optical tool.

The other side — the mirror surface itself — was polished bronze, ground and finished until it could return a near-perfect reflection. In an ancient world where that kind of clarity must have been a remarkable and rare thing, it was built with a single purpose: to let you see yourself.

"Together, the two sides carry a complete idea. Understand the world around you. Understand yourself. That entire philosophy, compressed into a cast object sometimes no larger than two inches across."

That was the moment I realized this was no longer going to be an ordinary art project. The need to know ourselves so that we can live better isn't a modern problem. It's universal — and I found real comfort in discovering I wasn't the first to feel it, or the last.

The radial geometry on the backs of those TLV mirrors bore a striking resemblance to Buddhist sand mandalas, and I took that as my next clue. I visited a Tibetan temple in Madison to watch monks build one. Beginning at the center and working outward, they laid intricate patterns of colored sand using no tools — only ritual knowledge and devotion. Each gesture deliberate, each mark meaningful. The whole thing radiated patience. When finished, the mandala would be swept away and offered to a body of water — a blessing to the universe, and a symbol of the journey from ignorance to enlightenment.

Standing there, I understood something I hadn't before: human creativity is a powerful alchemy. The ancient mirrors taught me the power of perspective and pattern recognition — both internal and external — and the monks gave me an example of abstract personal transformation through meditative craft. The ability to turn any experience, good or bad, into new and valuable perspectives for others is central to humanity. I believe this trait is either an evolutionary miracle or evidence of a higher power.

What I could say was this: I was in a low place, and I needed to change. Not adjust — change. I wasn't going to move forward by doing more of the same and hoping for different results. The mirrors gave me a clue: I needed to look at the world and myself objectively, without past experiences distorting my perception, if I were to find a new way of living. Like the monks who swept away their masterwork the moment it was complete, I was going to have to release my attachment to who I had been, look clearly at what I had learned, and find an entirely new way of seeing what came next.

Armed with these perspectives, I felt ready to begin. To sketch, to concept, to start turning ideas into something real. It was time to enter the foundry.

THE FOUNDRY

Making this piece inside an active aluminum foundry meant working within constraints that no art school curriculum or prior experience could have prepared me for. The interior is a vast, labyrinthine space filled with turning machines and employees carrying out processes at every stage of production. Forklifts move constantly through the aisles while molds the size of cars hang overhead from gantry cranes. Around every corner, something is happening — and if something isn't being made, it's being tuned or reconfigured for the next job.

To say I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. I had to learn quickly how to work around and alongside other people in a space where every inch seemed claimed by either a person or a machine. A younger version of me probably would have grown frustrated with the circumstances quickly, but I had accepted the challenge, and I knew the only way forward was to drop my negative feelings.

Fortunately, the people in the foundry were welcoming and receptive to the project. I was lucky to befriend Wyatt early on, who became an invaluable source of help and motivation during some of the harder stretches. He was in the pattern shop when I first met him, and he would later help design and shape the mirror's frame segments. I came to deeply value his attention to detail and his meticulous focus. Working alongside him made it clear that we shared a high standard of craft, and he met or exceeded it every time. That made him not only a trusted friend but an essential partner in taking on a task of this scale.

We built mold boxes from plywood and screwed casters to the bottom so that even the largest molds could be moved by one person. At first, I was concerned that the scale of the boxes might cause flex or distortion in the inch-thick plywood, but everything stayed remarkably flat. Molds this large are typically fabricated from steel or aluminum for structural reasons, which also adds significant cost, and the last thing I wanted was to drive up expenses on an already ambitious sculpture. We chose plywood instead and made the patterns from flexible foam, since the master that Wyatt and I had sculpted was rigid with little to no draft. The flexibility of the foam allowed it to compress and pull free from the resin-bonded sand once it had set — a key advantage of the no-bake, or air-set, sand casting process, where loose sand mixed with resin hardens on exposure to air.

In the end, we produced a functional, reusable mold box — roughly 50 by 50 inches, with no-draft geometry — for under $700 in materials. Was it perfect? No. Would it survive an industrial production run? Probably not. Did it work for making a sculpture on a tight timeline, as inexpensively as possible? Perfectly. Strange circumstances sometimes require wildly creative solutions, and these molds were exactly that — unconventional, built within real constraints, and exactly sufficient for what they needed to do.

Throughout all of it, I leaned heavily on the workforce, who were generous enough to share what they knew. Those people — John King, Aaron, Wyatt, Cory, Robert, Al, Jersey, and others — carry a depth of knowledge so thoroughly internalized it reads as instinct. Watching the more experienced workers talk through a process was quietly revelatory. You could feel how long certain understanding had taken to accumulate, decades folded into offhand observations. It reminded me of monks deep in meditative practice, so present within their work that they know every grain of sand.

I wanted what I made to honor that. Not just to use the foundry as a backdrop, but to genuinely be of it. None of this happens alone. You need a community to make things real.

THE PIECE, FINISHED

The large cast metal mandala I built is a visual record of learning how to know myself and finding a new way to live. The design is mine, but it doesn't have to stay that way. It can be anyone's self-portrait — an open invitation to the kind of inward journey that doesn't end.

The frame is a single sculptural motif replicated nine times, drawn using the arc of my own forearms, left and right. The sculpture is roughly five feet in diameter, made of cast aluminum, stainless steel, and aluminum bronze, with a polished red brass mirror at its center. The radial geometry draws from TLV mirror iconography; the petal forms echo Tang Dynasty mirrors and Buddhist sand mandalas; and the brass hemispherical domes along the outer ring are hand-sanded to a finish that catches light the way sun hits open water. Like a monk working outward from a center point, I rebuilt from the inside out — reordering priorities, confronting the emotional patterns that had been quietly steering my life without my full awareness. The circular organization of color, material, and surface finish is visual proof of that reordering.

For most of my adult life, I took my cues from modern expectations. I moved fast, worked long hours, and optimized for output. Industrial design trained me to solve problems efficiently — to ship, refine, produce. That mode served me well for a long time, but it's a framework built around commerce and technical problems, and at some point, I collected problems it couldn't solve. They were spiritual and human ones — the result of years spent trying to exist inside a culture that rewards speed, efficiency, and the superficial while quietly disregarding everything else.

Why was I here? What was I building toward? Was I doing anything good for others? Why does nihilism pair so effortlessly with the cold, technocratic future that seems to be arriving whether we want it or not?

The mandala's single pattern, repeated nine times with each iteration shifting in color and finish, was my subconscious proposing a correction. To regain a balanced life, I needed to reorder my priorities and strip away the external expectations I had been carrying. We don't need to keep up with anything. What we actually need is to slow down — to engage in the kinds of pursuits that develop our humanity and keep us whole: make art, learn about lost cultures, practice writing, or whatever soulfulness you prefer, so that when the demands of modernity arrive, we meet them with more to give, if we even choose to play the game.

Learning about ancient mirrors and Buddhist philosophy wasn't a superficial detour or merely content for a sculpture. I pursued it because I needed something modern culture wasn't offering — propositions about life that reached beyond efficiency, productivity, or the fake performance of meaning. I was following an instinct, and I took from it what I needed.

I think most of us need to do more of that. To look in strange, unlikely places for what the subconscious is reaching toward — and to take that search seriously, even when it leads somewhere that doesn't fit neatly into a career or a brand. The problem is that we're doing it less and less, partly because we're busier than ever, and partly because something has moved in to fill that space. Tech platforms, influencers, algorithmic feeds, tribal politics — all of it is extraordinarily good at simulating the feeling of meaning without delivering any of the substance. It's fast and it's frictionless, and that's precisely what makes it so hard to see through.

The real thing is slower. It asks more of you. But it's the only kind that actually changes anything.

The mirror at the center allows the viewer to literally see themselves inside the mandala — a new frame for an old reflection. But look closely at the edges and you'll notice distortion. That's intentional. Our self-perception is shaped, and often warped, by the experiences we carry. The past has a way of coloring the future before it arrives, and I know this firsthand. I've been too quick to reach for a dark conclusion before the outcome was clear, because my history had already told me what to expect. We live in an age that moves faster than most people can process, and more people than ever seem genuinely disconnected — from themselves, from others, from any stable sense of what is real. The first step out of that narrowing is honesty. Looking at yourself clearly — not harshly, but honestly — and recognizing that the lens you're using may be distorted. Once you can do that, something opens. The fear of seeing your own faults dissolves, and what's left is something closer to clarity and the ability to plan a real way forward.

Casting metal felt like the right process because it mirrors the transformation. Like a monk's sand mandala, metal is changed by heat and shaped by geometry, its limits defined only by what we haven't yet imagined. The solutions we need — in our own lives and in the world — are rarely found by repeating what we already know.

This piece is an invitation to look inward. To examine what drives you, where you find joy, and what you've been avoiding. A spirit journey compressed into geometry — a psychic map cast in metal and left in the world for anyone willing to see themselves differently in it. As long as there is sunlight, there is time. And if there is time, we can still look — outward and inward both — and become who we need to be.