Sara Bjarland

Wall tapestry. Used floor mops, cotton. 305x200cm. In the collection of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.

This work deals with the manual labour of cleaning, as well as that of handicraft; undervalued work that is often done by women or marginalized people. This work contains several layers of time; the time spent cleaning with the floor mops, the time spent collecting the used mops, the time spent taking them apart and the time spent knotting them together into a wall tapestry. The work also contains all the dust and dirt that the mops have soaked up. I’m interested in how our personal lives and individual actions relate to the broader questions of traces that we leave on the earth’s surface; dirt (or pollution or debris) that we are trying to cover up or rinse away, may no longer be noticeable as such, but matter only changes form and never disappears.