Isaac Monte grew up in Belgium visiting his grandmother's basement, where stalactites hung from the ceiling. He has been trying to reproduce them ever since.

He studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and graduated in 2013. The crystal work took two years of testing to arrive at the right technique and the right mix of minerals, and another year after that to learn how to control color. For a long stretch the crystals crumbled and fell apart when he lifted them out of the tank.

The method is simple to describe and hard to do. Five to seven minerals go into boiling water in a large metal tank. A form made of glass, ceramic, metal or 3D-printed material hangs in the solution. The tank cools, slowly, over days and weeks, and the minerals come out of the water and grow onto the form. Nothing is glued. The crystals are the object.

He sets the chemistry, the temperature and the timing. After that the tank decides. Color depends on which minerals went in, and the size and density of the crystals on how fast the water gives them up. No two come out alike, and he will tell you he cannot fully steer any single one.

He works from a studio on the Schiemond in Rotterdam and calls the series an argument about time. Natural processes, he says, are the proof of it.