The same astrolabe under twelve hundred years of corrosion The astrolabe newly cast, clean bronze

Digital sculpture · Istanbul

I make objects that were never buried, then bury them.

Every piece is built clean and then aged in the file, pass by pass, until the salt, the pitting and the bloom sit where a century would have put them. Drag the line and watch one do it.

See the objects Commissions

The objects

Twelve things that never existed

Every plate is the same size so the objects are not. Each one carries its own record underneath: what it is made of, and how big it prints.

All twelve

Statement

What I am actually doing

I spent five years taking corrosion off objects that had earned it. Now I put it on objects that have not. Everything here was built clean and then aged deliberately, which means every mark on it is a decision I have to be able to defend, and none of it is an accident.

Method

The object is modeled clean, then corroded in passes that can each be switched off again.

Rule

Nothing on a piece may be older than the surface it is sitting on.

Sources

Every texture starts as a scan of something that actually rusted, within walking distance.

Output

Archival pigment prints up to 200 cm, and now and then a bronze.

Elif Yalin, Karakoy

Weathering

One object, four ages

The Karakoy astrolabe, run forward. Four passes, each one a layer that can be turned off again.

As cast
0 As cast Clean metal, sharp arcs, nothing on the surface but the light off the rings.
First tarnish
40 First tarnish A brown film closes over the whole body. The engraved grooves darken before anything else.
Bloom
300 Bloom Green spreads out of the joints, and the first pitting opens along the outer ring.
As found
1,200 As found Salt crust in the hollows, and one edge worn bright by a hand that is not in the file.

Simulated age, in years

Made physical

The ones that left the screen

Three pieces have been taken out of the file and made. The foundry works from the same geometry the print is rendered from, so the object and the picture are the same object twice, and only one of them is still ageing.

Vessel, ribbed

Vessel, ribbed

  • Made by Kadikoy Bronze
  • Material Silicon bronze
  • Edition 3 of 3

Cast in 2024 and left on the studio roof for a winter. It is now greener than the file it came from.

Lock plate, rosette

Lock plate, rosette

  • Made by Kadikoy Bronze
  • Material Cast iron
  • Edition 1 of 1

The only piece where the real rust has almost caught up with the modeled one. Two winters, so far.

Bowl, rim dented

Bowl, rim dented

  • Made by Studio
  • Material Plated resin
  • Edition 6 of 12

Made light enough to hang, because the room it was going into would not take the weight of metal.

Words

What people say about it afterwards

Deniz Aksoy Curator, Galata Modern Objects Without Provenance, 2025

We hung the astrolabe next to a real one from the collection and the room split down the middle over which was which. That argument is the exhibition. It is also, I think, entirely the point of her work.

Ivo Brandes Keeper of metalwork A reconstruction, 2024

I asked her to reconstruct a vessel we know only from a drawing in an 1888 catalog. What came back was not a guess dressed up as a fact. It arrived with four pages of notes saying which parts she could defend and which she could not, and the second list was longer.

Sofia Marchetti Private collector, Milan Weights, a graded set

I have bought a lot of work that photographs well and lives badly. This one gets more interesting the closer you stand to it, which after two years in the hall I did not expect to still be saying.

A three-spouted bronze lamp on a dark plate
Lamp, three spouts On the wall until March

Viewings

Come and stand in front of one.

Prints hang in the studio on Saturdays, and anything not hanging can be brought out of the plan chest with a day's notice. Tell me which piece and it will be ready.

Ask to see it How commissions work