Rust

Rust, and I don't mean the programming language du jour, is an unending fascination of mine, representing as it does a wonderfully complex interaction between ferrous materials and oxygen itself. On the face of it, rust would seem to indicate irreversible decay and despoliation of otherwise solid and reliable material. On the other, it is simply the natural combinatorial action of a reaction between a metal and a reactive element, resulting in the formation of an oxide of that metal. The beauty of it however, is that the resultant oxide can be reduced and reversed chemically, as anyone who has studied basic chemistry at school will know.

The oxidation of iron of course can lead to violent reactions as well as the gradual oxidation of itself into rust, however, given sufficient heat and fuel. Iron Oxide III or red iron oxide [rust without the water-based component, if you like] for instance, provides a very good source of oxygen to fuel a thermite reaction in a number of reactive metals, such as aluminium, given a kick up the arse by a source of high temperatures, such as burning magnesium, producing enough heat in the process to weld iron and steel railways tracks. It's also a very spectacular process to witness, in itself [blog posts passim].

My take on rust though is largely philosophical and aesthetic. I think it beautiful, and it is also a reminder to me of the transience of existence and the fragility of our constructed and considered human environment. Everything unmaintained will quickly pass to dust of some sort, and even the maintained at some point will be neglected for some random, human reason, and fall into decline. I once, as an art student in the 1970s, made a small series of sculptures that relied on the rusting of steel plates as the modus operandi of those pieces: their agonisingly slow destruction itself the point. My then tutor was much excited and exercised by that brief passage in my output. I moved on. As does my thinking; although I'd like to make some more of those ephemeral rust pieces in the future, as they were actually pretty good. Rust never sleeps, to quote whomever, and in essence, rust is just the Earth reclaiming its own back from us: a nicely circular nicety for the ages, methinks...