ROCKLAND— On Chris Gamage’s work table sits a wooden box, centered by a miniaturized fire ring. Around the fire ring several aluminum figures are sitting or reclining. The piece represents Chris and his friends at a Portland campground the night of a friend’s bachelor party years ago. After he flips a switch, the fire ring actually flames up from an gas burner inside the box. Another piece on his work table depicts small aluminum figures perched on various elevations of granite blocks. Any Mainer would recognize this sculpture as a childhood swimming hole where kids are about to jump.

“My friends and I spent a large portion of our childhood jumping off Atwood’s Quarry,” he said. So much of his artwork is personal, 3-D manifestations from his memories.

Gamage started his career while in college in Fort Lauderdale for graphic design.

“I was right on the verge of switching over to computer design when I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on a computer,” he said.

Changing tracks, he took a year off and began studying sculpture and fine art at the University of Maine. While there, his sculpture teacher took the class on cast iron conference in New Jersey, which would inspire the course of his life.

“It was amazing, he said. “After we came back, we ended up making a foundry and that is what I realized I wanted to do.”

Gamage said that once he gets an “image” of something artistic, the thought process won’t leave him alone, sometimes for years.

“The only way I can get rid of it is to make it,” he said.

His most recent piece came about through his job as a metal worker at Rockport Marine. He was working on a lathe, making dolphin strikers, which are the two arms that come off the front of the boat connected by a wire. As he tapered them down with a lathe, he was watching spirals of bronze sheer off. To someone else, the bronze turnings might have just looked like the byproduct or waste material; to others it might have looked like the tangled brown spirals of a ruined cassette tape. To Gamage, they looked like beautifully spun leaves on a tree.

Once more, it was an image that he couldn’t get out of his head. So, he collected all of the turnings and brought them to his workshop, where he constructed the rest of the tree and surrounding bucket out of mild steel welded together.

 In the back of the work shed on his property in Rockland is a homemade foundry he constructed himself out of a steel drum. When the foundry gets going, it can heat up to 2,000 degrees.

“When the furnace is running and the metal is molten, there’s just a certain look of it, the smell of it, I just love,” he said.

Asked what is smells like, he joked, “Nowadays, it just smells like work.”

He always has his eye out for unsalvageable bronze pieces, such as an old keel bolt that no longer works.  His sculptures have a dual role, not that he ever consciously intended to recycle metals that might have otherwise ended up in a waste treatment facility. “When I take some of the discarded bronze scraps away, I always try to give something back to the boatyard, whether it’s getting the crew bagels, or something else,” he said. It’s a win-win, as discarded metals don’t end up in the landfill and once melted down, become re-imagined as art.

On top of his full-time job, Gamage runs his side business Bog Bronze, doing metalsmithing for boat owners and other customers, but his artwork is what motivates him to fire up the foundry on a weeknight of a weekend. “I hope to keep the artwork and the foundry business take off so I can work from home. That’s always been the plan for the future, he said.”

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com