The sheet of copper I left on the workbench overnight has already started to darken at the edges. I hadn’t done anything to it yet, just cut it to size and walked away, and already the reaction was underway. Every mark I make will fade. The metal is oxidizing as I shape it, but somewhere along the way that oxidation stopped being the problem and became the work’s language. For a long time I treated entropy as the enemy.

Last November at Art Rotterdam, a gallerist I’d been in contact with for months walked past my corrosion pieces without stopping. I watched her pause at the booth across the aisle, large-format photographs of rusted industrial surfaces, beautiful work, surfaces that could have been cousins of mine. She stayed there for twenty minutes. She never came back. I stood behind my table for the rest of the afternoon, smiling at people who glanced and moved on, and felt the plain humiliation of being unnecessary.