Invisible Dust

About

Alice Sharp, Invisible Dust Curator and Director

Founder, Alice Sharp has worked as an independent curator of projects with visual artists since 1997. Sharp set up Invisible Dust as a collaboration with atmospheric chemist Professor Peter Brimblecombe, whom she met at Tipping Point. Invisible Dust is a not for profit organisation and involves leading artists, creative technologists and scientists exploring our environment to produce exciting large scale art exhibitions often in outdoor spaces.

In March 2012 Invisible Dust won the Lord Mayor of London’s UK Sustainable City Award presented for ‘outstanding contributions to enhancing air quality’ for its work in 2011.

Invisible Dust was one of two organisations in the UK to be awarded a Large Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust for the ‘Invisible Breath’ project 2010/12.

Our major project to date ‘Invisible Breath’ is a series of art commissions on breathing and air pollution. In 2011 artists HeHe looked at the affects of burning oil through a performance about the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster shown on BBC Look East news and Faisal Abdu’Allah’s Double Pendulum premiered next to the London Olympic Stadium, and was covered by both the Guardian and the Huffington Post. The artists projects were accompanied by art and science education activities with families, schools and young people around air quality. Our estimated audience for the past year’s projects is 120,000 people. See projects.

Upcoming projects

Dryden Goodwin’s new animation ‘Breathe’ is currently being created for the South Bank in Autumn 2012. We are also developing new art-science collaborations with artists Jeremy Deller on the tracking of bat populations, Elizabeth Price (on outer space with Dr Hugh Mortimer of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) and Mariele Neudecker (Professor Alex Rogers of Oxford University and writer Gretel Ehrlich) on unmapped terrains such as the deep sea and the arctic).

Our mission

The mission of Invisible Dust is to encourage awareness of, and meaningful responses to, climate change, air pollution and related health, technological and environmental issues. It achieves this by facilitating a dialogue between visual artists, creative technologists and leading world scientists. Invisible Dust strives, through its creation of high impact and unique arts programmes, alongside developments in new technology and scientific theories, to create an accessible, imaginative and approachable forum and stimulus.

As well as supporting the creation of new scientific ideas, developing the relationships between creative technologists and artists and engaging audiences with large scale events, education and community activities, Invisible Dust’s works seek to raise awareness of the key climate change imperatives and objectives now being tackled by National and International Governments, Policy Makers, Charities, NGO’s, Global Corporations, Investors and Consumer groups.

Concept

Visibility plays a key role in trying to gain an understanding of the need to live sustainably and dramatically reduce climate change. Artists have many ways of making things visible and, particularly since the Land Art movement in the 1960s and 1970s (such as the ephemeral works of Richard Long and Robert Smithson) have responded to changes in the natural environment in a variety of forms.

ICT technologies are increasingly important in promoting low-carbon economic growth. Invisible Dust is developing cross platform commissions to explore what is seen as ‘art,’ and explore the boundaries of art practice and new media. Artists are increasingly exploiting data hacking and real time sensors. ICT has an enormous role to play in assisting how scientists research and monitor our environment and advances of technology such as smart buildings offer new sustainable ways of living.

Joseph Amato writes about ‘the visible world of dust.’ Amato contests that this informs our ‘perceptions of reality’. The invention of cleaning equipment and the modern day obsession with removing it has changed how we live our lives. Once dust was the smallest thing the eye could see, now our relationship with dust has dramatically changed due to powerful microscopic devices. For scientists, society’s transformation took place in the laboratory through the viewing of atoms, molecules, cells, and microbes; this also defined dust and the physical world for the first time but also our view of the human body and mind.

After the congestion charge was first implemented in central London the air became cleaner than before the charge had been implemented but no one could see the evidence, it had to be revealed by subtle statistical analysis. On a global scale the ice caps are melting, coral reefs and rain forests are being destroyed. In order for us to understand the consequences of our actions on the environment as human beings we need to ‘see’ the results.

In his research, Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and senior editor of Atmospheric Environment, Peter Brimblecombe from the University of East Anglia has discovered that children’s playgrounds are more polluted than the surrounding area due to the exhaust fumes from the parents’ cars at the school drop off. In addition, Professor Frank Kelly is conducting research into how air pollution effects not only our lungs, but is a cause of heart disease due to small diesel particles passing into the blood.

How can people understand their own effect on the environment when the resulting gases disappear into the sky? Since the industrial revolution there have been huge gains to society but also the creation of many of the gases that are now poisoning the earth. Invisible Dust brings together artists, technologists and scientists to help illuminate these consequences and bring a sense of something human and fantastical to very invisible problems.