STEELPLANT 3 (WASTE / NOT — Steel Shavings)
Steel shavings emerge as by-products of industrial manufacturing processes. They are residues of drilling and milling — traces of precise technical work. Displayed as a still life on a pedestal, they are removed from their functional context and become legible in a new way: their forms evoke vegetal structures, branching growth, and fragile plant-like figures.
In Ruth Mateus-Berr’s work, these industrial remnants enter into dialogue with rare and endangered plants. STEELPLANTS thus connects two seemingly opposed spheres: industrial material production and vulnerable natural forms. The steel shavings appear not only as waste or resource, but also as carriers of an image of nature under increasing pressure from resource extraction, technological expansion, and ecological endangerment.
Steel is among the most universal materials of our time and can be recycled up to 99 percent. Yet even a circular material points to interventions in material cycles that can never be viewed independently of ecological interrelations. By translating industrial residue into the language of the still life and at the same time into the morphology of rare plants, the work opens a new perspective on the relationship between value, vulnerability, and transformation.
STEELPLANTS reveals that the residues of technical production contain not only material but also ecological and symbolic meanings. Those who see only the shavings and not the plant, only the material and not the cycle, overlook the connection — and with it, the urgency.
