Opening tomorrow on 29 June, The Ethics of Dust is a major temporary site-specific artwork commissioned and produced by Artangel for Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Houses of Parliament, home of the UK’s House of Commons and House of Lords. Created by artist, architect and conservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos, the work is a 50 metre long translucent latex cast of the hall’s internal east wall, containing hundreds of years of surface pollution and dust.
Suspended from Westminster Hall’s 28-metre high hammerbeam roof, the latex sheet contains innumerable particles of dust, soot and dirt gently lifted from the wall, the method for sensitively cleaning this UNESCO world heritage site. Artangel and Otero-Pailos have worked in parallel with Parliament’s restoration and stone cleaning project over a period of five years, culminating in Otero-Pailos retrieving the latex used to clean the hall to create The Ethics of Dust.
The Ethics of Dust takes its name from Victorian writer and social thinker John Ruskin’s 1866 publication The Ethics of The Dust. Ruskin’s great admiration for Westminster led him to lay the intellectual foundations of modern conservation. Anticipating concerns over pollution, he recognised its damaging effects on buildings, but argued against cleaning it, fearing 19th century architects would do more damage than good with the blunt instruments available to them at the time. Conservation technology has now advanced to the point where cleaning can be safely carried out as Ruskin would have it, without damaging the stone.
Completed in 1099, Westminster Hall’s limestone walls may well hold the dust, soot and dirt generated by events including the Second World War blitz and the Great Smog of 1952. Among its many uses, the hall has housed the coronation banquet of King George IV in 1821, the trials of Guy Fawkes in 1606 and King Charles I in 1649. Westminster Hall is still used for public ceremonies and lyings-in-state, most recently the Queen Mother in 2002.
Michael Morris and James Lingwood, Co-Directors of Artangel, said “The Ethics of Dust is amongst Artangel’s most ambitious undertakings, made possible by the goodwill of a great many stakeholders within the Palace of Westminster, brought together by the shared belief in a bold and imaginative idea; an idea at the cusp of contemporary art and architectural conservation. After several years of quiet and careful planning, we are delighted that Jorge Otero-Pailos’s latex casting of Westminster Hall’s east elevation will be experienced by those who pass through it over the summer.”
The Ethics of Dust by Jorge Otero-Pailos is at Westminster Hall 29th June – 1st September 2016 Admission is Free but tickets must be booked beforehand at: Artangel.org.uk/ethics-of-dust/events on the site you will also see information on a series of talks and tours.
