From Dust to Stars, Opening address by Nina Liebenberg, April 23, 2015
We shed many skin cells – at per hour it comes close to a million cells per day. New cells generated at the bottom of our layered epidermis push their way to the top, where they are weathered by the environment and our daily activities.
As the living body breaks down, it becomes lodged in skin pores and clothing fibres. It is inhaled, irritates, is sneezed out and blown afar; it collects in corners, and gathers on surfaces. It welcomes company –incorporating soil, dust lifted by weather patterns, volcanic eruptions, pollution, plant pollen, animal bodies, minerals, and even burnt meteorite particles – its components made increasingly microscopic and indistinct with time.
The body, now fluid and divisible, transgresses boundaries. Transformed and nomadic, it inhabits spaces without detection. That is, until a ray of sunlight reveals drifting motes hovering in the air, the search for a missing shoe reveals a copulating fluffle of dust bunnies under the bed, or an artist by the name of Dominique Edwards gathers these former remnants of ourselves from the tools used to seemingly eliminate them, into sheets of paper. On closer inspection, these sheets reveal a multitude of its separate components: eyelashes, cosmetics, grains of sand, diminished chewing gum wrappers and pubic hair. There is also glitter. And a surprising amount of it. Cosmetic add-ons or meteorite particles?
Merging the micro and the macro is one of the many tools in Dominique’s bag of tricks. As a magician sprinkles dust in a fairytale to enable magic to occur, she shows us the ordinary, the everyday – then zaps us with a shrink ray, so we become miniscule and view the ordinary from a new humbled perspective – before blowing us up again – and jetting us off into outer space – to ponder the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And she does all of this while we’re scrutinising an eyelash, or a standard size piece of carbon paper as black as the blackest hole, or washing cycles of cyclonic proportions.
In many ways, dust is the metamorphosis of the macro into the micro. It is a diminishment that does not result in waste. Quite the contrary to rubbish or surplus, dust speaks about the circularity of life – and about the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone.
Dominique’s empathy for the world and the things that surround her instigates a metamorphosis in the lives of whatever catches her attention – and in this regard, she is not picky. Nothing is too lowly, too micro for her to imbue with cosmic significance. From packing tape to cow entrails, each material is carefully and sympathetically considered. Metamorphosis happens at a variation of speeds, depending on the material and the context. Many changes take hours to execute: a page is filled with thousands of microscopic dots during which hours grow into days and stretches into weeks. Some changes take a second to register: a single moment of looking up and feeling empathy for a broken, naked cardboard tube, discarded on the floor after what cloaked it, was used up.
With her Ever-present empathy, she guides and coaches the materials into forms that allow them to stretch and stick and climb and crumble in ways they thought impossible.
If you take nothing else from this show (and I am pretty certain it will move you on many levels in many different instances) it is this empathy I implore you to attune to. At a time when we are scarcely tolerating our fellow human beings, feeling an ache on viewing a broken cardboard tube or a sheet of human remains, serves as a reminder that in the end we will all metamorphose into a substance that is fluid and infinitely divisible, to mingle with each other – and with the animals, plants, sand and the stars.