Feature: Exhibition - Bricks at the Wellcome Collection from March 24 - August 31
Published: 3 February, 2011
by JOSH LOEB
Victorian London’s notorious dust mountain is the inspiration for artist Serena Korda’s latest work at the Wellcome Collection
MUD, dirt and smog fouled the area around the clay pits of Somers Town, where machines clanked and industrial processes turned rubbish into ashes and then bricks.
The dust mountain – a vast, volcano-like mound – loomed ugly on the skyline. Notorious in London, it was immortalised by Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend.
The mountain had made men rich. “Golden dustmen” would buy discarded objects – leather, clothes, iron – and burn them in the brick yards. The ashes were mixed with cement and new areas of London such as Holloway and parts of Kentish Town – along with the foundations of St Petersburg – were constructed from the bricks.
The emotive image of the Somers Town dust mountain and the biblical saying “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” have inspired a thought-provoking artwork which will go on show next month at the Wellcome Collection as part of its “dirt season” – a series of events examining mankind’s battle to keep clean.
Artist Serena Korda visited London institutions including the British Museum, Albert Hall and Grant Museum of Zoology as part of her quest to assemble a vast collection of dust particles – which so far includes dead skin, wood shavings, insect cartilage and gorilla fur. She is calling on people to send her the contents of their vacuum cleaners and dust pans in special envelopes which can be obtained from the Wellcome Collection.
The detritus will go to a good cause. Korda will mix it with clay and use it to manufacture hundreds bricks at the HG Matthews brickworks in Buckinghamshire. These will be inscribed with messages and paraded through London with much pageantry before being ceremonially buried later this year.
“The dust heap was something we can’t really imagine today,” says Korda. “It was a familiar sight, part of a Victorian person’s everyday life. It was a place where people could earn their fortune. That view of the commercialisation of waste was what fascinated me – the idea of industry growing out of the heaps and being formed out of dust and ashes.”
She gestures at the walls around us in the Wellcome Collection’s café. “Without bricks we wouldn’t have any of this,” she says.
“We wouldn’t have any of the stuff down below either. Although we complain about the pollution of London nowadays, to imagine the city when the dust heap existed and to envisage living without the kind of sewer system that exists today is quite a thought.”
Korda, who trained as a fine artist, is fascinated by “folk objects”. She says she likes dust because it reveals intimate information about people and places. Her previous works include Old Men’s Flesh, a tapestry reproducing the tattoos found on old men in pubs and working men’s clubs in Roman Road in East London. The patterns were copied and sewn onto a tablecloth to keep a record of a “forgotten element” of our culture.
Her work is a mixture of imagination, engineering and sheer toil. Brick-making the old-fashioned way is intensely physical.
HG Matthews make bricks for use in conservation work by the National Trust so must use anachronistic methods, which Korda has had to learn.
She describes the process as “almost like baking”. It uses a mould which looks like a bread tin and must be sanded in the way one would flour a tin when making a cake.
“Then you take the clay and plop it on a table,” she says. “There is a process of making what is called a dumpling.”
This looks like a big block but must be chucked into the mould with great precision.
“You have to throw the clay into the mould with force and confidence because if it hits the side of the mould it causes some scrapes down the side of the brick. This is the bit I’m rubbish at. I am not a completely natural brick-maker.”
She is planning to create 500 bricks by April. All will be numbered and inscribed with information detailing the derivation of the dust contained within them. They will be buried as a “time capsule” in the hope that, centuries from now, our descendants will exhume them and learn something of our lives from messages left behind in the bricks.
• Dust donation envelopes are available from the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1, where bricks will be exhibited from March 24-August 31 as part of the exhibition on dirt and cleanliness.
Follow the project at http://donateyourdust.blogspot.com