Dust Devil

Household dust, storage jars, tornado maker, acrylic panel, plinths, photographs. 2016.

As if by magic, one Christmas morning an A-framed playhouse appeared in our backyard. Suspended, it hovered like a bird above a patch of grass. Corrugated iron wings caught the early morning sun. Wanting the house to settle, I took ownership of it. I remember the satisfaction that came from cleaning this space. My reward: a place to play and dream.

The playhouse experience, linking cleaning with delight, resonates in adult life. In contrast with childhood, cleaning the home is often a habitual, mundane and repetitive task. Yet this activity also rejuvenates everything and conjures space to think. There is a kind of absurdity—a craziness that exists within the act of cleaning that is entirely play.

Living yields dust: a substance made up of strands of hair, flakes of skin, bird feathers, cat dander, dog fur and bits of food that combine a collected history of animate and inanimate life. Michael Marder, writing on dust, describes the way objects gleam from beneath it as:

“reminiscent of the way a child experiences existence and language: with excitement and a taste for discovery; with a mixture of eagerness, uncertainty, and apprehension; without preconceptions; with all the sense organs wide open.”

The dust in this work was given. Donors emptied their vacuum cleaners into bags, and I decanted the dust into jars—a household in powdered form, skin and hair and food and pets, indexed by whoever swept it up. Suspended in water and photographed at monumental scale, it becomes something else again: nebulae, weather, deep space. The tornado maker turns it. The plinths hold it still. What was thrown out is put on display, lit and labelled, and asked to be looked at.