Rebecca opened the door to B34 and there in front of us stood two pairs of children’s prosthetic legs, both sets had shoes and socks on, with harnesses that strapped to the body. Two children circa 1970: without bodies. Their proud stance allowed us to imagine what they may have looked like. We stood at the door not really wanting to go in, uncomfortable as we were unable to ask these semi invisible guardians for their permission to enter. Our chilling silence was broken by some nervous laughter and Kate walked through the door. I didn’t go straight over to the children’s legs, Kate drew our attention to one of the limbs she recognised from a previous visit to the stores. It had been owned by a roofer, who had mended it himself over the course of his lifetime, using bitumen left over from jobs. It was caked in layers of black tar that looked a bit like burnt treacle with glistening jet stones embedded in it. This limb was the crudest of the others that lined the shelves. Most had been beautifully crafted out of wood and early plastics, their rendering highly accurate and realistic creating a sense that we were surrounded by a room-full of sleeping limbs abandoned by their owners. Each one with the potential to spring to life and move around the room, but only once we had left it.
As we moved through this building there was a prison like quality about its labyrinthian corridors and enormous steel doors, all coated in a thick layer of light ochre paint. There wasn’t really a smell in these corridors; which had once belonged to the post office, however, certain stores had particular smells evocative of the objects they housed. When entering store B49 we were hit by a pungent waft of fluoride not surprisingly as this was housing a collection of dental objects. I dusted a twice life size plaster model of lower human teeth illustrating decay in European races as determined by Professor V. Suk, c. 1920. As I carefully moved my brush between these giant teeth I was reminded that I needed to go the dentist. There were other dental models dotted around the room, as well as an array of leather upholstered dental chairs, all equally as uninviting as the next. I started to feel a dull pain in my bottom left hand molar and knew it was time to move on.
Leaving Blythe House I was struck by a strange and unsettling sense that these inanimate objects had some how left their mark on me. Although I had been wearing a boiler suit, mask and gloves remnants of the dust I had disturbed seemed to be clinging to me: I felt a sense of urgency to get home and wash.
Charleston House was bought in 1916 by artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, it became the stomping ground for their friends: artists and writers who belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. The house was transformed by Bell and Grant as they decorated walls and furniture in their unique hand painted style.
I was taken up to Vanessa Bell’s Studio, at the top of Charleston House by Maggie the conservationist. She was at the head of operations, instructing volunteers in the art of cleaning and dusting old textiles and other precious objects in the house. This time of year is when all National Trust Houses are, what is called in the business, “put to bed”. An opportunity to clean everything in the house before it is re-opened in the new year. Things that had been cleaned were covered in tissue paper and white cotton sheets, leaving the sense of a ghost house: haunted objects lined the corridors and staircase. The dim lighting adding to the sense of an uninhabited cottage, filled with veiled memories and history but not too much dust.
The eager volunteers hadn’t got to Vanessa Bell’s studio yet so I was hoping for the dust of some “bright young things”. I came equipped with my own dust busting kit but Maggie had the best sable brushes for the job and proceeded to dust up cobwebs, decapitated fly’s and lace wings. We moved downstairs into the dinning room, Maggie opened the curtain to this medium sized square room. The winter sun streamed into the dark room revealing a large round table at its centre, which had been hand decorated by Vanessa Bell. Maggie delicately removed dust from the table with a red velvet cloth, she had been collecting dust herself from this room. There was a piece of plastic on the table that had been attracting dust for weeks, Maggie needed to get it analysed as there were some conservation issues in the room that may have their answers lying in this pile of dust.
The National Trust is very concerned with dust, conservationists in general are. Dust is the bane of the art conservators life, one mustn’t clean too much but one mustn’t let dust settle for too long. If you do, it can stick to objects like a thin film of glue, causing a lot more damage than a regular gentle dusting.
Jackie the archivist was my contact and she had found me, what she thought, might be the best spot to find dust in this otherwise meticulous building in the round. She led me to an inconspicuous door on the ground floor, her key ring had a large brass disc on it with the word ORGAN engraved into it.
The door was opened and I was invited in to the “Bellows Room” of the Grand Organ built over 130 years ago by Henry Willis. I was honoured to walk into the internal structure of this auspicious instrument. Intricate steep laddering led me into hard to reach corners of the organ’s 9990 pipe’s, a seemingly endless and sprawling array of cylinders of metal and wood. The space was hard to fathom and with no sense of true perspective I began to feel like I was in an Escher drawing.
I was ecstatic over the blankets of dust that were to be found under the bellows and near the ends of pipes. My favourite dust was clinging to the back of the organs elaborate grills: delicate fibrous tentacles that glimmered in the stage lighting coming from the auditorium.
Jackie recollected an alleged piece of organ history as I delicately picked at this dust. Apparently a Suffragette had sneaked into the bellows room and installed herself in one of the pipes of the organ the night before an important political gathering in the hall. The next day she proceeded to disrupt the meeting by wailing her heart out through the pipe, transmitting dark moans in to the auditorium.
As I collected dust Jackie told me more about her role at the Hall, as the archivist she is cataloguing over 20,000 show programmes that have been made since the Hall opened in 1871. As well as this she has been collecting ghost stories of the R.A.H: accounts from staff of sightings in and around the building. Apparently when the organ was being refurbished in the 1940’s builders who had taken out the original staircase had seen an apparition walking up and down where the stairs had once been. The figure was wearing a skull cap and was thought to be a disgruntled Henry Willis, upset at his Grand Organ being disturbed.
As we climbed the layers of the organ, dust dispersed and appeared to get thinner as we reached its upper most echelons.
Father Henry Willis
On 15th December I reached my goal of collecting the first 200 samples of dust, from institutions, houses and business across London and beyond. These samples are the first to be transformed into bricks, which I will be making at HG Matthew’s in January. This is the beginning of the stack of 500 bricks that will grow over the course of the exhibition “DIRT” at the Wellcome Collection 24th March - 31st August 2011.
There is still opportunity for you to donate your dust to the project: I need to collect another 200 samples by March, envelopes are available from the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd London NW1 2BE and UP Projects, contact donateyourdust@upprojects.com for your envelope with instructions.
Read on to see my dust collection diary highlights.
Naomi (ceramics consultant on the project) sent me a link to H.G Matthew’s and Son who have been making traditional hand made bricks for over 87 years. I watched a short film explaining the brick making process and was so impressed by their website I sent them an email to see if I could make my 500 bricks at their brickyard in Buckinghamshire under the tutelage of their expert brick throwers.
The following day I got a phone call from Jim, the youngest of the three brothers now running the family company. I spoke to him for a short time but immediately realised his passion for bricks and his understanding of the project. He told me that the KLF who burnt a million pounds in 1994 had approached him to turn the ashes of their million pounds in to a brick. Jim excitedly told me that their brick had turned out a beautiful golden colour, mainly because of the ingredient of the ash. Jim was so pleased with the colour of the brick he thought he might be able to get ash from the Royal Mint and make a series of special edition golden bricks. Sadly the Royal Mint declined his proposition. Jim asked me if I might approach the Royal Mint again but this time in the context of my project. I really like the idea so will give it a go, it compliments very well the bricks symbolising the development of capitalism in the city and the projects initial inspiration, the commercialisation of waste.
Later that week I met Jim at the brickyard and he gave me a guided tour. It was fantastic, I got to meet some of his team, who I watched making four brick at a time in a very heavy looking mould. Jim reassured me I wouldn’t be making my bricks with this mould but would be working in the specials room, which was a cosy little space at the other side of the yard. Hanging from the wooden rafters of the barn were lots of individual moulds, a myriad of shapes and sizes, curved bricks, bevelled bricks, brickettes, any and every sort of brick that you can imagine. This was certainly a special’s room. Jim pointed to a corner and said that I could sit there for a month making my bricks if I needed to, although one of his boys could throw 500 bricks in 2 or 3 days. But my bricks are going to be slightly more complicated as I need to mix in peoples dust to each brick, number them and make sure nothing gets mixed up so later when they are leathery hard I can imprint them with each persons initials.
I also encountered my first frog in this specials room. The frog in brick-makers terms is the indention found on the top of most bricks, allowing the brick to take up the mortar more effectively. It is often imprinted with the brick-makers company name. They are usually made from wood and are rectangular with bevelled edges and the raised initials or name on the top surface. I will be making a frog for my bricks that read’s “Laid to Rest”.
One of Jim’s expert throwers showed me how a brick was made, it seemed a bit like cooking, there was a certain kind of alchemy to the whole process perhaps because he performed the act so effortlessly and quickly before my eyes. The soft clay is rolled in sand, the mould is dusted with sand (a bit like dusting a cake tin with flour, to aid the release). Then the clay is thrown in to the mould with great precision, the mould is thrown down onto the bench, a cheese wire is run along the top of the mould to remove excess clay and then the brick is turned out on to a perforated metal tray for drying. Magic!
Crossness Pumping Station is not generally open to the public, but there are occasions every year when it does open its gates to visitors. Enthusiasts and the uninitiated come for miles to take a peak at restoration work in progress, and see the Prince Consort, one of the four steam powered pumps, in action. It has taken a team of retired engineers and enthusiasts about 10 years to restore the Prince, and for open days like this, visitors are enthralled by its spectacle of Victorian engineering prowess. Every 30 minutes the Prince chugs into action, it’s actually surprisingly quiet for a pump producing about 125 h.p enabling it to pump over six tons of sewage at each stroke. Whilst the Prince sputters and gurgle’s subtly in the background visitors in hard hats look around in ore at the beauty of Charles Driver’s incredibly ornate caste-ironwork. Some parts have been restored to their former glory, singing out in bright red, yellow, gold and green: these elaborate decorative features give Crossness its nick name “The Cathedral on the Marshes”.
Crossness is located at Thamesmead near Woolwich and as we approached the corporate gates of Thames Water, (the modern day treatment works sits close to the original Crossness Pumping Station) the wind was blowing the right way to give us an olfactory reminder of where we were.
As we drove about 300 meters along a small bumpy road we passed the modern treatment works, directed by a couple of well placed, hi-vi clad, volunteers en-route we were eventually confronted by Crossness. This majestic yet slightly worn building remains as a monument to Joseph Bazelgette’s civil engineering masterpiece: London’s Sewage System. Opened in 1865 this pumping station contributed to the health of Londoners as it pumped sewage efficiently out of the city whilst also improving drinking water. Bazalgette was chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works charged with the duty of ridding London of the foul stink of 1858. Before Bazalgette’s sewage system the Thames had operated as an open sewer, being filled with the contents of London’s WC’s and cesspit’s. There was only one further out break of cholera after the pumping stations and sewage system were put in to action.
Crossness has a pseudo religious quality, it represents purification of the city and its people. There is a reverence built into the architecture of the building and it is this quality that I am particularly drawn to. Volunteers currently working on restoring Victoria (one of the other four steam pumps at Crossness) are collecting her dust and dirt for “LAID TO REST”. In the context of this project Crossness dust has been elevated into “Holy Dust” which in turn will produce “Holy Bricks”.
