About the Film

This foundry casting documentary film follows sculptor Louise Plant making Ps in a Pod, a family of iron sculptures that moved away from static gallery display and out into public space. Shot over a year across Devon, Halifax and County Durham, the film follows the sculptures from their earliest plaster models through to their final casting and siting across the county. Like the people they were partly inspired by, the Ps appear broadly similar at a glance but are each subtly different in form, an idea the film returns to throughout.

From Plaster to Public Space

Each P began as a small plaster model in Plant’s studio in Devon, growing out of drawings that explored ideas of individuality and difference. From dozens of these models, three were chosen, refined and scaled up for the sites already planned for them. Enlarging a P meant building a welded steel skeleton, carving and sanding hard foam over it into shape, layering plaster-impregnated glass fibre sheets for strength, then building up further plaster to give the surface its final volume before rasping, filing and sanding it smooth, so that each figure reads as one continuous form with no clear beginning or end. Filming this stage meant spending long, quiet days in the studio watching a shape slowly resolve out of raw material, a pace that suited the subject far better than a rushed studio visit would have.

Casting in Iron at Hargreaves Foundry

The enlarged Ps travelled to Hargreaves Foundry in Halifax for mould making and casting. Iron was never an arbitrary choice of material. Given how central iron and ironworking are to County Durham’s own industrial history, casting the Ps in iron tied the finished sculptures directly back to the landscape they were destined for, long before any of them had actually arrived there.

A Sculpture That Travels

Rather than settling in one place, Ps in a Pod moved between sites that show off the real range of County Durham’s landscape, from Noses Point in Seaham to Wharton Park in Durham, Bishop Auckland town centre and Hamsterley Forest. Each new setting changed how the sculptures read, the same forms picking up a different character against a coastal headland, a town square or a forest clearing, and each move meant returning to film them fresh in a genuinely different landscape.

Same But Different

As the Ps travelled around the county, Plant worked alongside schools and community groups on workshops exploring the same themes running through the sculptures themselves, what makes people alike and what makes each of us distinct. That strand of the project matched the sculptures’ own logic closely: each P generally similar in outline, yet no two ever quite the same. It gave the sculptures a working life well beyond simply being looked at, turning them into a genuine starting point for conversation wherever they were sited next.

Filming Over a Year

Making this foundry casting documentary film meant following one continuous process across three very different settings, a quiet studio in Devon, a working foundry floor in Halifax, and the open, changing landscapes of County Durham, over the best part of a year. Few projects give you the chance to follow a single artwork all the way from a handful of plaster models to a finished iron sculpture standing in a public space, and that arc is really what this foundry casting documentary film is about. Coming back to the same sculptures across three counties and four seasons meant the film could show genuine change over time rather than compressing a year of work into a handful of hurried visits.