Dust Works - Royal College of Art, 1994

Alongside my degree-show work at the Royal College of Art in 1994, I began collecting material swept from the floors of disused and derelict rooms. I sifted the collected dust and debris before carefully reinstalling it on the floor in precise geometric forms.

I became fascinated by how differently the material appeared once it had been removed, sifted and reordered. Each room seemed to produce its own colour: dust gathered from a room containing a hearth was a deep brown, while material from another had an ochre quality. It was as though the accumulated dust carried something of the visual character of the architecture from which it had been gathered.

Using masking tape to establish exceptionally straight edges, I sifted the material into immaculate rectangular areas before removing the tape. The precision of the installation contradicted expectations of dust as something dirty, incidental or requiring removal. Seen at this scale and with such sharply defined boundaries, the surface could appear more like a textile or carpet than accumulated debris.

At the time I was interested in Wolfgang Laib's pollen installations, which I knew through photographs in artists' books, and in his transformation of an extraordinarily modest natural material through processes of gathering, sifting and concentrated presentation. My own interest lay in what could happen when an even humbler and more disregarded material — the residue of an interior — was treated with comparable care.

These early works established an interest in overlooked materials, accumulation and transformation, and in the possibility that changing the context and manner in which a material is presented can destabilise our understanding of what that material is.