Beyond Memory

A piece of steel has been sitting in a bath of ferric chloride for three days. When I pull it out, the surface has turned into something I wasn’t expecting. A landscape, almost. Ridges and valleys, dark deposits along fault lines, and in one corner something like steam caught mid-drift. I’m holding the panel at arm’s length, acid stinging the cuts on my fingers, and something happens.

I see a battlefield at dawn. Steam lifting off wet ground. The slow drift of figures, the dull concussion of impact beyond the ridge, and closer, much closer, hooves on soft ground. Men afraid and trying not to be.

Then it’s gone. I’m standing in my studio in the Netherlands, holding a piece of corroded steel, and my hands smell of iron and chloride.

This has happened before. Not always battlefields. Sometimes figures moving across open ground, low to the wind. Sometimes a hand on the back of my head while I lie in freshly cut grass. The weight of that touch. The green smell of it. I have never been on a battlefield. The hand belongs to no one I can name.

They feel older than that. Much older.

Not nostalgia. Nostalgia reaches back to places you’ve been. This reaches further, to places you couldn’t possibly have been, but your body insists you were.

Proust searched for stimuli that could unlock realized memory, sensory triggers that would bring the past flooding back. The taste of the madeleine, the uneven paving stones. But Proust’s memory, however involuntary, was still his. It belonged to his lifetime, his experience, his particular nervous system. What I’m describing has no such boundary. The images that surface when I look at corroded metal don’t come from my past. They come from somewhere before my past.

I don’t have a theory for this. I have the experience of it. Which is, of course, exactly what anyone who’s lost their grip on things would say.

My friend Maarten visited the studio last month. He’s a biologist, careful with language, suspicious of anything that sounds like mysticism. I showed him a new panel, copper and zinc on steel, three weeks of controlled exposure followed by two nights outside in the rain. The surface had developed a topography that reminded me of aerial photographs, or perhaps of skin under magnification. Territories of color bleeding into each other along borders that looked contested.

He studied it for a long time. Then he said something I didn’t expect.

“It looks like it remembers something.”

I asked him what he meant.

“The surface. It’s not random. It’s not designed either. It looks like the result of a long accumulation of events. Like a landscape that carries the history of everything that happened to it.”

He was right. The metal surface does carry the history of its interactions. Change any single variable and you’d get a different surface.

Then he said something else.

“You know, organisms work the same way. Every interaction with the environment changes the organism, and those changes get passed down. The physical structure of a living thing reflects not just its own history but the accumulated history of its lineage. We carry the traces of interactions that happened long before we existed.”

He said this casually. Biological observation. But I felt it settle somewhere in my chest.

Is it so strange, then? That looking at corroded metal might trigger recognition of something that predates personal experience? Not mystical transmission. Resonance.

I should say: I don’t entirely believe any of this. I believe it in the studio, in the moment. At the kitchen table afterwards, eating bread and cheese, it sounds like something I’ve talked myself into. Both of these are true at the same time, which is not a paradox I’ve resolved and probably won’t.

The hunters crossing the plain. The steam. The hand in the grass. They arrive with smell and temperature. When I imagine a scene, I build it piece by piece. These arrive whole. The texture of things witnessed.

In the studio, I’ve learned to pay attention to when this happens. It’s never when I’m planning a composition or thinking about process. It’s always in moments of direct sensory contact with the material: the weight of a steel panel in my hands, the heat of a chemical reaction through my gloves, the sharp mineral smell of freshly exposed metal. The body has to be involved. The mind alone doesn’t trigger it.

There is a particular moment in the corrosion process, just after I remove a panel from the acid bath, when the surface is still wet and actively changing. Oxidation is happening in real time, the metal darkening, patterns forming and dissolving, colors shifting as chemical compounds stabilize or transform. In that window of active change, the surface is at its most alive, its most unpredictable. It’s also when the images come most readily.

The body recognizes something in that moment. Not the forms on the metal but the process, material reshaped by its encounters. The body knows this because the body is this. We are corroded by experience. Our surfaces shaped by every interaction our ancestors underwent before us.

The acid eats into steel and reveals a structure latent in the grain. Maybe these images are similar. Latent structures, revealed when the right conditions dissolve the surface of conscious thought.

In zekere zin trouw te blijven aan wat voorbijgaat. To remain faithful to what passes. I wrote that years ago and have been circling it since. I think about it when I seal a corrosion piece. The metal was becoming something else, and I chose to hold it here. Not because I understood it. Because something in the body said now.

But what am I preserving? A dark stain spreading through zinc that reminds me of dusk. Just dusk. The way evening holds still for a moment before it commits to being night.

I know how this sounds. I know it brushes against the kind of mysticism that Maarten would politely resist. But I’m not proposing that metal has consciousness or that rust carries messages. I’m proposing something simpler and stranger: that the process by which metal accumulates traces of interaction is recognizable to a body that is itself the product of accumulated interactions. That the recognition is real even if the “memories” it triggers are not memories in any conventional sense.

There is a panel drying on the studio wall right now. Steel, treated with a sequence of acids over six weeks, left outside for four nights in March rain, then brought back in to stabilize. The surface is extraordinary; I can say this without false modesty because I had very little to do with it. The chemistry did the work. I set up conditions, made choices about exposure and timing, intervened at certain moments and stepped back at others. But the surface that emerged belongs to the interaction itself, not to my intention.

When I look at it, I see a plain at dusk. Flat ground, horizon glowing (eerst zacht zalmroze, dan amber) shadows smoothing out every irregularity in the land. Figures in the middle distance. Hunters, reading the wind, moving together the way people move who don’t need to speak. Steam of their breath. The cold finding the gap between collar and neck.

It has smell. Earth, distance, iron tang. The metal in front of me or something older.

I am romanticizing this. Probably I am describing a calendar photograph and calling it ancestral memory. The honest answer is that I don’t know, and the less honest answer, the one that makes better essays, is that the not-knowing is itself the point. I’ll let you guess which answer I’m giving here.

I don’t try to explain it anymore. Knowing it might be self-deception doesn’t make it stop. I don’t try to metabolize it into a theory about collective memory or inherited experience or the unconscious. The images are what they are: arrivals from somewhere beyond personal history, triggered by the body’s encounter with material that carries its own deep record of interaction.

The work, when it works, holds both: the literal surface of corroded metal and the ghost of something underneath it, something that can’t be named or explained but can be recognized. Like the pressure of a hand on the back of your head in the grass, belonging to no one and everyone, impossibly specific, impossibly old.

I keep making the work because the work keeps producing these recognitions. Each new surface is a different landscape of accumulated interaction, and each landscape calls up different images from wherever these images live. The studio fills with panels that are simultaneously chemical records and windows into something that might be memory, or might be deeper than memory, or might be the place where the distinction between the two dissolves.

Tomorrow I’ll mix a new acid bath, cut a new panel. My hands will sting. The metal will darken.

Hunters. A battlefield. A hand in the grass.

Alles is voorlopig.