iron mullein spring planting from Alaina Mahoney on Vimeo.

Much of my past work was devoted to the site of a factory outlet building in Brockton Massachusetts which burnt down about twenty years ago.  It left behind its bare carcass of brick that housed a huge boiler sitting below a smokestack tower.  The other remnants were pushed into heaps and left to degrade into lush twisted metal, wooden beam, and industrial waste compost.  These intricacies are the basis of my Bargaineer paintings.

In 2009, the Bargaineer was finally demolished.   The machinery left the site again in scads, but this time the smoke stack was kept company by massive piles of masonry debris.

From the soil of what was a city of steel cable grew mullein and burdock.  They have since spread and climbed the concrete mounds to visit and encircle the smoke stack.  I cast these plants in iron and blacksmith them in steel.  My brother Greg and I plant them back where they came from, so that the iron will weather and be broken up in the soil as artifacts of that from which they grow.