Kim Morgan: Dust Disruptors
Kim Morgan: Dust Ball (belly button) 2021, SEM image of navel lint magnified 1,000 times, printed on silpoly fabric sphere,
198 cm diameter. Photo: Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott
Dust Disruptors is an ongoing, open-ended performative project by interdisciplinary artist Kim Morgan. It involves a series of mobile inflatable objects constructed out of very light fabric printed with enlarged scanning electron microscope (SEM) images. The images are derived from dust and ash samples taken from human bodies and their immediate environment. In Dust Disruptors, Morgan continues her preoccupation with the body’s materiality, from its tiniest structures to its farthest-reaching entanglements in the stuff of the universe.
Starting in September 2021 and continuing intermittently to Summer 2022, the Dust Disruptors are being workshopped and recorded in various interventions around the campus of Dalhousie University. One might encounter them rolling around like a giant beach ball, as in the Dust Ball (belly button) interventions, or rising in front of you and collapsing like the “tube guys” on used car lots (which inspired the Stray Hair inflatable that made its debut in Nocturne last October); they may temporarily disrupt a path, block an entrance, or simply float gracefully aloft. Inevitably, given their source in bodily matter, these objects can both attract and repel, eliciting both playfulness and disgust. Equally, they offer an occasion for wonder, and ways to explore conflicting feelings about our personal and collective vulnerabilities.
Dust Disruptors have been realized with the technical and professional assistance of Felix Bernier, Kate Delmage, and Jessica Winton; and financial support from Dalhousie Medical School (SEM imaging), and Arts Nova Scotia.
VIDEOS OF DUST DISRUPTORS
