Physically, Rotting Flame is comprised of a branching steel armature in the shape of a large flame with over 400 ripe oranges impaled on spikes projecting from the structure. The structure is suspended out from a wall held in space by fine metal cables, the oranges are allowed to decay naturally given the conditions of the surrounding atmosphere.

Rotting Flame is an instrument of chemical transformation and time. The processes of fire and decay are essentially two forms of oxidation, fire is relatively fast and decay is much slower. In this sense Rotting Flame is the image of fire animated within the time frame of the decay of oranges. The orange color of the citrus also parallels the incandescence and final oxidation of carbon particles in the brightest part of a flame.

Important antecedents to Rotting Flame were a series of site-process works from the 1980’s into the early 1990’s in which fire was the essential agent of physical and durational change. Land Monitor/ Fired Volcanic Boulder, 1980, Wave Kiln (of Fire), 1984, Untitled (Earth Orchid), 1988 and Metabolism and Mortality/O₂, 1992 are exemplary of this series. In these environmental projects the fire was an agent of change in the geologic sense, used to alter earth materials within a site-developed furnace structure; here geologic time was compressed into human time by speeding up the normally glacial rate of geologic transformations.

Rotting Flame also engages metaphorically with metabolic and entropic change associated with landscape, photosynthesis and other biochemical cycles as well as human metabolism, agriculture and energy systems. Many of these concepts were further explored in a subsequent body of process/photo works such as Séance (Entropic) I & II, 1995, Thyroid Portraits/Knights (1-6), 1995 and Metabolism Study (Falling Knight), 1995 as well as in the sculpture, Novum Organum II (Two Suns), 1998.

John Roloff, 1999