completely dusty

REJECTION of dust and other deviant dangers plays an important role in maintaining the illusion of order. Completely Dusty is composed of structure provided by benandsebastian and dust provided by Thorvaldsen’s Museum in Copenhagen. The work takes inspiration from Thorvaldsen’s plaster sculptures, whose porous surfaces are stained by decades of dust.

Completely Dusty has not reached its full potential without the time taken for dust to settle into its underlying surfaces. The piece’s grooved walnut latticework and leather bindings both harbour dust and are fragile enough to be threatened by the delicate use of a feather duster. While dust slowly unsettles the piece’s obsessive order, attempting to thoroughly clean the piece would most likely lead to the work’s collapse. The piece both accommodates and defends the dust that we try to eliminate from our lives through clean lines and frictionless surfaces.

‘‘When the big girls ‘good for anything’ arm themselves, each morning, with a big feather duster or even with a vacuum cleaner, they are perhaps not entirely ignorant that they contribute as much as the most positive savants to keeping off the evil phantoms that sicken cleanliness and logic’’
– Georges Bataille