Gathering

Dust Study. From the dust works. House dust suspended in water. 2018.

My best ideas arrive while I am vacuuming. Not at the desk, not in front of the work, but pushing a machine across a floor, thinking about nothing.

Years ago, I began collecting the dust from vacuum cleaners — mine, and other peoples. I suspended it in water and photographed it. Particles drifting, gathering, falling. Fibres, hair, a fragment of orange thread. A way of seeing something that is usually invisible, and that everybody throws away.

I understood the work then as being about the home: its labour, its residue, the evidence a house leaves of itself. It is about that. But looking back, I think I was also photographing something else. Not making as a single act, but as a thing that accumulates — material taken in, held, suspended, and only much later settling into form.

This month I have made nothing. I have been reading, watching, following other people's work. There is a name for this phase — gathering, then incubation, when material is absorbed, connections begin to form, and the work continues without taking visible shape. It is rarely conscious. Usually you only know afterwards that something was forming.

Last week I watched the Shirley Jackson biopic. What stayed with me was the sense of a writer working from inside the conditions of her own life — the house, the family, the town — and finding in the familiar something charged and unsettled. Years ago, in Wellington, I bought her Dark Tales and never opened it. This week I took it down. I listened to The Lottery, whose reception was famously hostile: letters of complaint, cancelled subscriptions, readers unsettled by how calmly the violence went about its business in a village square.

Louise Bourgeois spent a lifetime returning to the same material — memory, family, the house she grew up in — circling it in fabric, marble, steel, and cages. She did not exhaust it. She kept finding another form for the same room.

Both of them worked from within the conditions of their own houses. I don't think it is an accident that this is what I have been reading all month.

If I had to place myself, I would say I am in the gathering phase. Looking, feeding the work, letting something take shape without forcing it.