Ster Borgman

I see myself as a magical scientist and I have been researching rust and glass as a queer way to leak out of the structure of western science. I have been working with rust in glass as a natural pigment for my graduation in Fine Art at ArtEZ. I have built a greenhouse out of pigmented glass that makes the overgrowing quality of rust visible. I grew up in Aalsmeer, an area with many old greenhouses. Some of them are abandoned and overgrown, making you wonder what grows inside. Rust is a growing crystal that slowly overgrows. It acts like it is not moving, but when you look away it starts dripping and leaking everywhere. I make black rust pigment and melt it in between pairs of glass plates in an oven 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.