Floor Dust Pattern

Once i had starting planning out my installation I decided that it would be a good idea to do a floor piece to accompany the room. It was Catherine Bertola that inspirsed me to work on the floor, as she had done a number of dust patterns which i thought could be used aswell to represent dreams within the room. I decided that I wanted to continue the lace theme that has run through the rest of the piece linking all aspects together. I had a rough idea of how i could create a pattern with the lace and I had a temporary fabric adhesive that I knew would not be too hard to clean up, but would be sticky enough to create the pattern. My method of creating this pattern was to place the lace on the floor where i wanted the pattern, sprayed the adhesive over the top of the lace, removing the lace and then spreading the "dust" across the space.

I had to do some tests to find out what kind of "dust" I was going to use. I tested flour and baby powder, I found that as the baby powder was easier to spread and stuck better to the floor. I also noticed that the adheasive wasn't particularly resistant to brush strokes and this began to bring the pattern up when i was spreading the powder around. I resolved this by using a brush with more fine bristles, a make up brush worked well. I also noticed that the thicker the layer of spray adhesive meant that a thicker layer of powder stuck, which made the pattern easier to see. I made note of this so that i knew to get a good layer of adhesive down during the real piece. I also decided to test how the tests lasted when left over time, I left the test on the floor for a few days to see how it had faded. This showed that the pattern wouldn't fade over time which was good as it had to last a few days once it had been created.

The real piece was on a much larger scale, this meant that a larger area had to be sprayed before the lace was removed, which also made it harder to definitely spray everywhere, and evenly. This caused a problem, towards the end of the first spray the first can began to run out. This meant that the end of the pattern was patchy. The only solution was to clean up this section and to do it again, carefully. This is because I wanted the pattern to match up. Another issue was with the cleaning up, this is because I had to brush away the powder. I had to brush the powder around before brushing it away from the space, and once all of this powder was away from the piece it had to be cleaned up as it can be very slippery. I had to be very careful not to clean off any of my work while making sure all the podwer was up.