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The Dust Archive is a body of work stems from primarily looking at the pervasiveness of dust. Dust is inevitable, unavoidable, all pervasive — a ubiquitous threat both physiologically and culturally. The artist is interested in how this impinges on the museological practice of collecting culture. Dust is produced through the inexorable process of entropy, and so not only represents the very impossibility of preserving culture, it is what makes it impossible. Dust is the by-product of decay and no matter how much we guard against it, given time it wins. Permeating everything and knowing no boarders it terrorizes the collection, the archive and art history no end. Dust also becomes a strong metaphor - its near invisibility allows it to enter under the radar, to go undetected within the museum.
Dust also presents real physiological threats. The term “sick building syndrome” is synonymous with dust. The particles that lurk in corners and recesses contain everything from space diamonds to Saharan dust to fungi to the bones of dinosaurs and bits of modern tire rubber, poisonous lead and long banned pesticides, dangerous molds and bacteria and cancer-causing smoke particles. Such clusters are riddled with allergy inducing dust-mite parts, with the mites themselves, and with the pseudoscorpians that stalk and kill them.
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