Images > Of Rust and Rays

Natalie Hunter
Of Rust and Rays
2024
Archival pigment prints on baryta paper
24" x 36" each

The de-industrialization process has been happening across Canada slowly over time for the past couple of decades. In 2019, Slater Steel, a company operated in Hamilton, Ontario’s North End since 1906 was partially demolished. The impact of this demolition created some environmental problems and affected the residential community surrounding this site by covering houses, cars, and neighbourhoods in decades of built up dust and debris. Since this demolition the steel corrugated shell of the building has remained; slowly being removed piece by piece.
My uncle worked for Slater Steel between the 1970’s and its eventual closure. As a daughter of a steel worker I have witnessed the cultural and economic shift in Hamilton’s North End from working class trades jobs to creative industries and gentrification. Hamilton’s industrial buildings are slowly being sold off and repurposed for film sets and prop houses, new condo buildings and development opportunities; invigorating this community with new energy and growth but significantly shifting this industrial landscape and the neighbourhoods that inhabit it. All while a smaller yet core group of steel workers continue to manufacture steel on a national and international scale in some of Canada’s most well known steel manufacturing companies.
Driving along Burlington St. And Nikola Tesla Boulevard I often witness the touch of light glinting off of Hamilton’s corrugated metal industrial buildings that make up much of the North End’s architecture. Of Rust and Rays attempts to capture this phenomenon in the fluctuating precarious state of this landscape through in-camera layered photographs of Slater Steel’s remaining fractured architecture. Acidic greens and saturated blues mix with safety yellow and rusty orange. Sunlight bleaches and weathers long standing metal buildings while impacting the subtleties of colour and light that illuminate these buildings through time. Latent images trace the architecture, processes, and people that worked in this place; highlighting and the residue left behind when sites like these cease to operate. Layered, ethereal, and transient the resultant photographs in Of Rust and Rays reflect on the fluctuating state of this industrial heritage in Hamilton’s changing North End.