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.

“Whether dancing in sunbeams or lightly powdering the exhibits in a museum vitrine, dust is time made visible. It permeates any artefact, blurring its contours and borders, making it virtually impossible to say where the artefact stops and where the outside world begins. The coarse dust, from five microns in size, that the human eye can see unassisted, creates a powdery layer acting as a temporal veil between the observer and the observed. This velvety exoskeleton has us reaching for mops and buckets in recurring attempts to reset the clocks. Although quickening the inevitable decay of the object it settles on, dust can also imbue it with a certain stateliness or gravitas. If not left to settle too deeply it somehow enhances the artefact status of a sculpture or a brittle chair, underlining the fact that these things exist in a privileged world apart. But the difference between privilege and abjection may be only a few percent’s dust coverage. Dust really is the gentlest form of ruination possible”