Laid to Rest - an interview with Serena Korda

Laid to Rest - an interview with Serena Korda

17 December, 2010
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys gets the vacuum cleaner out. In the name of art of course.

Did you know that there used to be a massive heaps of waste right at the top of the Gray's Inn Road? And did you know that London has its very own Cathedral to Waste, a grand Victorian sewage pumping station located out east near Woolwich? I didn't. But I do now.

I'm sitting in the basement of Spoonfed Towers (in a room that we refer to affectionately as The Dungeon) and chatting away merrily with slightly jet-lagged contemporary artist Serena Korda, who proves to be a veritable fount of arcane knowledge.

But not only are we discussing little known facts about Victorian London, we're also – well I'm not, Serena is – collecting samples of dust and dirt from the old wood-burning stove thing that sits in the fireplace deep in the bowels of our office building, itself an old Victorian town house.

There is a reason for this. As part of the Wellcome Collection's forthcoming exhibition, Dirt – The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, Serena has been commissioned to produce a fascinating sounding work, entitled Laid to Rest. The project involves the artist collecting samples of dust from all sorts of different places – the homes of family and friends, the School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine, and right here in the Spoonfed offices. Each sample will then be incorporated into a commemorative brick, and the 500 completed examples will be formed into a kind of Carl Andre-esque palette of bricks and exhibited at the Wellcome Collection.

The project, Serena explains, has been inspired by the towering dust heaps that stood just near the Wellcome Collection back in Victorian times and the commercialisation of waste that began to take place (as depicted in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend). Serena – whose previous projects include examining the man who named clouds, investigating bomb machines in Stanmore, and digging holes in East Sussex – explains: “I like to take on subject matters that are often overlooked and highlight them in new ways. I'm always find myself wanting to find out more, wanting people to be curious, and to know who and where they are.”

So this project has seen Serena whipping out the dust buster and crawling about under people's desks collecting samples. It must be quite a strange experience, I imagine. “In a way,” Serena replies, “the best part of the project is the way people respond when I'm collecting dust. Especially if what I'm doing causes people to be jolted into reconsidering what they think they know about their surroundings. Sometimes though I've been made to feel quite subservient when I'm out collecting dust, even though I'm choosing to do it. I'm there on my knees with a dust-pan and brush, around other people. And it's...interesting!”

“For me,” Serena continues, “dust is an ephemeral, romantic thing – it's there and we can live with it being on the shelf. Dirt is a different.” It's important to note that Serena is not actually making the bricks out of dust, but incorporating these little traces of our existence into the fabric of the bricks. “It's more a token gesture,” she says, “like a lock of hair in Victorian jewellery.”

The idea is that the finished work will then be ceremoniously placed in the Wellcome Collection, thereby, Serena says, “elevating it into a sort of folk object. These are bricks that represent people and places, and have information embedded in them.” From there the plan is to bury the whole thing, ideally in Regent's Park, although this is to be confirmed. The concept of posterity is clearly important: Serena is interested in the idea of  “a thing that we take for granted, and is almost invisible, being transformed into something very tangible. And then being made to disappear! It'll be like a time capsule, creating a kind of modern archaeology – an archaeology for the future that might at some stage be dug up...”

Earth to earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. We're delighted to be a part of it – however small the contribution (nothing but some brick dust and two long-dead ladybirds) it's part of our past, and, now thanks to Serena, part of a shared potential future.

Laid to Rest has been commissioned by Wellcome Trust in association with UP Projects, as part of Wellcome Trust's DIRT season. Follow the project.

Dirt – The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life is at the Wellcome Collection from 24th March to 31st August 2011.

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Image credit: The Dust Heaps, Somers Town, in 1836, Old and New London, Walford Vol.5 

Tom Jeffreys