For my graduation at Fine Art in Arnhem 2023 I worked with rust and glass. Rust is something hybrid, something that grows and can overgrow. When I look at glass it pretends not to move, but when I look away it starts to drip and flow everywhere: it is slow, but unstoppable. In my artpractice I have worked a lot with rust. It all started with my fascination for colors and pigments. For six years I have been making my own pigments from plants, which I pick in my own garden or in the wild.
Plate 3/3 - 90x140 (glass, rust, steel - glassfusion)
I often dye organic fabrics with the pigments or use it as paint on paper. I also like to work with ceramics and glass, but unfortunately I was never able to process the pigments that I get from plants in my ceramics or glass, because those kilns reach temperatures between 800˚C and 1240˚C which make all the vegetable pigments totally roasted and black. Rust is an anorganic material that cannot get roasted in a glass oven, instead it actually transforms. So it turned out to be applicable to ceramics and glass.
I look for rusty items along the riverside and put them in a jar filled with water to make them rust even more. The longer I leave the rusty finds in water, the more black the rust becomes. This is what I use as pigment. The pigment I have now has been in water for five years. I fixed this pigment between two glass plates in an oven at around 800˚C. There, the glass finally fuses together and fixates the rust, which boils, and tries to escape. Eventually, the rust changes color from black to various shades of red, due to the heat. These glass plates are stills of a moment in deep time. But maybe the glass breaks after a year, 9 years or even 9 million years, crumbles into sand and the rust is free again.
Rust tells a story of deep time; how it erupts from the earth in the form of iron, then oxidizes through the rain and finally seeps back into the earth to melt back into iron. The longer I leave the rusty finds in water, the blacker the rust pigment becomes. The pigment I have now has been in water for five years. I fixed this pigment between two glass plates in an oven at around 800˚C.
Plate 3/3 - 90x140 (glass, rust, steel - glassfusion)
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