Named after the geological dictionary for hardened volcanic remains, Polish artist Marcin Rusak's Tephra series presents an intriguing fusion of the ephemeral and the eternal.
Rusak uses meticulously collected flowers as the primary material for his creations and places them on sculptural forms made of a mixture of metal and jute. A revolutionary thermo-coating process covers these unique arrangements with a paper-thin blanket of molten metal. This metallization process immortalizes the ephemeral splendor of the flowers, capturing an almost Pompeian tableau of silhouettes shrouded in volcanic fragments.
The artistic process involves a symphony of stitching, bending, and welding, but these meticulous interventions coexist harmoniously with the delicate fragility of the flowers. The industrial intensity of the metallization process softly envelops and slightly conceals these artistic maneuvers. The resulting sculptures resemble monochromatic reliefs, coated with flowing streams of liquid metal and fine-tuned by hand to achieve a shiny or muted surface.
Who is Marcin Rusak?
Marcin Rusak (born in 1987, Warsaw, Poland) is an artist and multidisciplinary designer interested in ideas of value, ephemerality and aesthetics. Specializing in storytelling, process and material investigation his work often incorporates research, object and installation as well as visual creations to explore overlooked details of our lives which recreated and re-imagined, are shown again in a different light.