Dust and Breath: The Materiality of Air Quality

Blight, Laura ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1534-6270 (2025) Dust and Breath: The Materiality of Air Quality. In: ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference - Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality, Virtual Conference.

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Abstract / Summary

This conference presentation (text + images) explores the material signifiers of air quality, witnessed through the presence of domestic dust. This practice-based research brings photographic attention to what is present and absent, material and ephemeral, as examined through a sensory and critical engagement of air’s material conditions, and through the traces it leaves behind. Through a photographic and textual investigation, this presentation considers the socio-economic, spatial, and environmental factors of air quality, which shape our everyday environments. Domestic dust—visible to the naked eye and the camera lens—serve as particulate markers, allowing for multiple interactions across interior and exterior thresholds. Through individual and collective breathing, this presentation aims to explore air as a carrier of both presence and decay, memory and matter, circulating between human and more-than-human worlds.

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