Some people might recognise the rusty metal image above as being part of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North sculpture.  I say sculpture, but of course it was “engineered” by consultant engineers Arup (a former employer of mine) so that the massive structure would stand up.  Although I started with trying to make an abstract image of the Angel rather than the more usual tendency to “get the whole thing into the picture”, an opportunity to put across an idea of scale and people’s amazement with the sculpture presented itself when the chap in the photo entered the frame.  (This happens to me a lot….especially when using a digital camera with shutter-lag! Decisive Moment?  Pah!)  He wandered around quite a bit, looking up at the Angel and trying to get a good angle to take a photo. Then the rest of his group arrived, so he must’ve been so excited to see the Angel that he made his way from the nearby car park far quicker than the others.  I did something similar.

People might assume that the rusty surface is a bad thing and therefore that the Angel only has a limited life-span.  It is however constructed from weathering steel which protects itself from corrosion with a thin layer of “rust” that develops on the surface.  There are many examples where this material has been used in the construction industry.  Antony Gormley also uses the material in much of his public art, eg Another Place at Crosby Beach, The Iron Man in Birmingham.  The “rust” used in these applications is therefore a good thing as it can look attractive, plus it provides some of the meaning behind the work, ie the Angel and Iron Man represent areas founded on a heavy industrial past.

The two images below show where the traditional tin-worm version of rust is used in a sort of positive way.  Rat look cars are popular on the custom car scene, with the rust being created and then further corrosion halted.  The rusty bike is, crucially, an old-style bike that was helping to show that the business it was standing outside of had been trading there for a long time, and that the owners presumably adopt traditional business values such as fairness and good service.