This is the story of how Zoe Tillotson’s bright red Telios 1400 Hoover sucked its way into her doctorate. It’s a tale of life and death, permanence and impermanence, time and space, toe-nails and eyelashes. And dust.
The Hoover sits in the back hall of Tillotson’s terraced house near Charlton Athletic football ground, and it was here one October day nearly two years ago that she decided it might help her out of a professional funk. She decided to have a look inside it. This was not technically the birth of dust-sorting as performance art because she had no audience, but audiences would come.
Last month, Tillotson was to be found in the airy new atrium of the Horniman Museum in southeast London in lab coat and rubber gloves. She had installed herself behind a large trestle table with bowl, sieve, tweezers, a Hoover bag of genuine museum dust and an array of Petri dishes which she very slowly filled, working six hours a day for two weeks. By the end the bag was still more than half full, but the chairs arranged round the table for spectators had seldom been empty.
The Horniman’s bag yielded 30 categories of rubbish, including used children’s plasters (2), human nail parings (about 6), Afro as well as Caucasian hair (Caucasians shed it faster), and a single cat’s claw. Earlier this year Tillotson performed the same service at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology, where she found no Afro hair at all, although in the neighbouring MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research she did find some 2,000-year-old fragments of Roman pottery.
Her dry run, in her kitchen, produced 19 rubbish categories including carpet fibres which she shampooed, feathers which she dusted and tiny splinters from her stripped pine floorboards which she buffed up individually with French antique wax polish. Next month she’ll perform her final dust-sort at Fenton House, a National Trust property in North London.
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You might ask why. She is interested in decay and time, and how the museum-based art world tries to control the one as the other elapses. She believes it is possible to be less uptight about both. Her argument, boiled a long way down, is that by getting intimate with dust she can embrace decay and even find life in it and by organising this intimacy as a chore that never ends, she can stop time in its tracks.
Conservators and curators have no such luxury. Two years ago the National Trust famously ordered a three-year ban on dust-removal in many of its stately homes because of the damage that vacuum cleaners and even feathers can do to ancient upholstery and wood. Professor Peter Brimblecombe, an atmospheric chemist at the University of East Anglia who may know more about dust than anyone in the world, has advised historic houses to guide their visitors along routes with as few sharp turns as possible and to position their most precious artefacts at the end of the tour, by which time fatigue has set in and people fidget less. For dust is us: our skin, our hair and the fibres from our clothes — and the more we move the more of it we make.
Tillotson’s dust collections all face oblivion in the end. The Cambridge ones she hopes to give the purgatory of temporary display as a de-sorted heap (in the museum) and an annotated “archaeological” find (in the research institute). But the Horniman’s dust will be returned to its bag and emptied into a bin. And that’ll be it? “Well,” she says. “We might have a tea party to celebrate.”
Zoe Tillotson is at Fenton House, Hampstead, London NW3 (020-7435 3471), until September 12, Wed-Sun only, 2-5pm weekdays, 11am-5pm weekends and bank holidays