Brass wire brushes. Steel wool. Bronze dust. All sourced from the hardware store — the same tools a metalworker uses to clean corrosion from a surface. Here they are used to deposit it.

The support is Chinese mulberry paper — xuan paper — used in East Asian painting for over a thousand years because of its particular relationship with material. It absorbs. It holds tension without tearing. It responds to what is placed on it rather than resisting.

The metal is worked directly into the paper. No binder. No varnish. No medium. What bonds the particles to the surface is pressure, time, and the chemistry of the metal itself.

Each work begins with the paper on a flat surface. The wire brushes are loaded with metal — brass leaves a warm yellow register; steel produces a cooler, harder grey; bronze sits between them, shifting toward green as it oxidises.

The direction of the stroke, the pressure applied, the density of deposit — these are the variables. There is no underdrawing. No sketch. The surface is built up in passes, each one responding to what the last produced.

The corrosion products — verdigris from the brass, rust from the steel — are not accidents to be avoided. They are the painting material. What metal becomes in its most stable state is what makes the surface.

The finished surface shifts with light. At one angle, the metal particles catch and hold. At another, they release it entirely. What appears dark at noon reads differently at dusk. The painting is not fixed at the moment of completion — it continues to change as the metal continues to oxidise, slowly, over years.

This is not a quality to be corrected. It is the point. The work holds the record of its own making, and continues to make itself after it leaves the studio. A collector who lives with one of these works lives with something that is still in motion.

The Greek word entropia means transformation — a turning toward. Not loss. Not decay. A change of state. Conservation science begins here: everything is already in the process of becoming something else. The question is never whether transformation will occur. It is what to do with it.

Twenty-five years working with objects that were transforming — shipwrecks at 4,695 metres, bronze statues returning to their constituent oxides, buried artefacts in conversation with the soil — produced a different understanding of stability. Nothing is stable. Everything is in a particular moment of its transformation. The paintings hold that moment, and continue past it.

The compositional logic of these works draws on the Shan Shui tradition — mountain-water painting — in which an object is placed against empty space, and that space is understood as active rather than absent. The emptiness holds the form. What is not painted is as deliberate as what is.

This is not applied as a style. It is structural. The metal deposits occupy part of the paper. The rest breathes. The relationship between deposit and ground is the composition. There is no background. There is only the field, and what has settled on it.