It was a Russian film set in the 15th century that inspired Cameron McIndoe to pursue a career as a founder.
He was just 17 when he watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s acclaimed The Passion According to Andrei, in which the film’s villains declare they’ll kill everyone in a young man’s village unless he makes them a bell.
“It was about an hour long this part of the film, and it showed every detail,” he said. “I just fell in love with it and that was it.”
Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Cameron runs his own foundry in Sunshine and takes commissions from some of Australia’s most prominent artists, including Sunshine’s own John Kelly, Brooklyn sculptor Geoffrey Ricardo and Geoffrey Bartlett.
It was in Mr McIndoe’s Sunshine foundry, Fundere, that John Kelly’s monolithic
Man lifting cow sculpture was brought to life.
It took a year to create using the lost wax technique, an ancient casting method that can be traced back to 3700 BC.
Kelly said that if it were not for Fundere, he would have had to have the bronze sculpture built overseas.
“I’ve always made my large sculptures in Europe because I’ve never felt there was a foundry in Australia that could really handle the scale of my work comfortably,” Kelly said. “There might be one or two who could just squeeze it in, but you always felt there was a bit of a restriction.”
The artist, who is based in Ireland, said it was serendipitous that Fundere moved its foundry to a larger site in Sunshine from it’s former base in West Footscray about the same time Brimbank council commissioned him to produce a sculpture to feature in Sunshine’s CDB.
