Ster Borgman

Ster Borgman, who sees themselves as a magical scientist, has been working with rust in glass as a natural pigment for their graduation in Fine Art at ArtEZ. They have built a greenhouse out of pigmented glass that makes the overgrowing quality of rust visible. Ster 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. It acts like it is not moving, but when you look away it starts dripping and leaking everywhere. Ster has been researching rust and glass as a queer way to leak out of the structure of Western science. 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. Ster makes black rust pigment and melts 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.

This page was last updated on June 15, 2023