An ongoing participative performance piece, archive and physical installation for galleries.

Gathering Dust is a collectively-created installation involving gathering dust in domestic and public spaces. Audiences are invited to collect ‘sweeps’ from different spaces – private or public, recording the location, time taken and any thoughts and contribute them to the collection.  A collection of ‘The People’s Dust’ is collated within an area and pooled into an evolving sculptural piece.

Taking inspiration from Duchamp and Man Ray’s 1920’s work ‘Dust Breeding’ and Mierle Laderman Ukeles ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’ 1969, the work continues this curiosity with dust, where it comes from and how it gathers. It continues to raise questions around calling ‘maintenance’ such as cleaning up dust ‘art’.

Exploring patterns of behaviour and attitudes to cleaning, the piece probes questions around who generally performs the cleaning role, how the task is shared in relationships and whose standards create the benchmark of acceptability in different spaces. It looks at how this repetitive, time consuming, largely unseen maintenance activity, is valued and how the ‘cleaner’ is remunerated by wider society.