Ingot is Marc Sweeney's attempt to make a chair in a single gesture, casting aluminium parts one by one on Loch Lomond, Scotland, then flooding their joints with more molten metal.
Marc Sweeney grew up in a boatyard on Loch Lomond, where his father builds boats and the family runs a cruise company on the water. He studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art, took a master's in product design at Istituto Marangoni in London, and spent a stretch assisting the designer Max Lamb before coming home in 2023 to set up a studio and workshop next to his father's. Ingot, the cast aluminium chair he posted in September 2026, carries a plain dedication: it was, in his words, "A 70th birthday gift to my dad."
The chair reads as a set of metal ingots that learned to stand up. Four tapered legs, a thin seat plate marked by four round pour points, a single tapered slab for the back. Sweeney casts each piece on its own, assembles them into the shape of a chair, then pours fresh molten aluminium into the joints where the parts meet. He describes it as "Individually cast aluminium ingots assembled and bound together by pouring more material into key joints. One material, one process, one action of melting and pouring."
Each piece is cast in an open mould, its top face left exposed as the metal cools. That top pour surface is the one Sweeney keeps as the finished face, so what the aluminium forms as it sets is left on view across the seat and the back.
