Decay
Erosion
Entropy made visible. Ruin as beauty, still in progress. Decay is the process and ruin is the state it leaves.
The word
From the Old French decair, out of the Latin de and cadere, to fall away. Decadence is the same word wearing better clothes. The fall in it is not a single event but a settling, the slow version of collapse.
The feeling
Decay is watched more than felt, and the watching has a specific taste: fascination with a floor in it. Time goes granular; you notice increments, the spot that has spread, the edge that has softened since last time. The body reads it as warning and invitation at once, which is why rust, rot and peeling paint are so hard to look away from.
Against its neighbours
Ruin is the noun and decay is the verb: ruin is what remains after, decay is what is still happening. Wabi-Sabi accepts what time does and calls it beauty; decay is the process itself, indifferent to whether anyone has made peace with it.
In the work
Surface breaking down while the structure holds. Texture eating into the image at the edges of forms, never at the edges of the frame.
No work carries Decay yet. The element is named and the table is not finished.