I see myself as a magical scientist. I have been working with rust in glass as a natural pigment for my graduation in Fine Art at ArtEZ. I built a greenhouse out of pigmented glass that makes the overgrowing quality of rust visible. I grew up in Aalsmeer, an area with old greenhouses. Some of them are abandoned and overgrown, making you wonder what grows inside. Rust is a growing crystal that slowly overgrows.
380 x 230 x 275
Rust acts like it is not moving, but when you look away it starts dripping and leaking everywhere. I have been researching rust and glass as a queer way to leak out of the structure of Western science.
By making a greenhouse I attempt to make the overgrowing quality of rust visible. For building the greenhouse I used the authentic wooden structure.
I used old greenhouse wood and all the glass I used is from old greenhouses. The unstained glass in between is not melted in my glass oven. It is unaltered old greenhouse glass with some traces of plants or moss, the previous conqerers of the greenhouse.
each plate is 45x40
Rust moves in a very slow time frame: it bursts out of the earth in the form of iron, oxidizes with rain, crystalizes and eventually it might again drip into the heat of the earth to melt back into iron. I make black rust pigment and melt it in between pairs of glass plates in an oven at around 800˚C. The glass melts together and fixates the rust, which starts to boil and drip. Eventually, the rust changes colour by the heat – from black to different shades of red. These glass plates are stills, showing a fraction in the long life of rust in deep time. But perhaps after a year, eight years or eight hundred years, the glass breaks, crumbles back to sand and the rust will be free again.
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