The Wellcome Collection are in danger of becoming a latter-day Steptoe and Son. A few weeks back, they asked each visitor to bring in ‘an object no bigger than your head’ as part of their Things exhibition. Now, they’ve gone even further, requesting samples of household dust from the public.

Artist Serena Korda is collecting the material for the ‘Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life’ exhibition, coming to Wellcome in Sping next year. She’s working on an installation that includes 500 commemorative bricks made from the dust. Your dust.

There’s an interesting historical premise behind this strange scheme:

Korda’s work is inspired by the commercialisation of waste in Victorian London, in particular the vast dust heaps which dominated the skylines at the top of Gray’s Inn Road. Immortalised by Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, the dust heaps supported a wide range of industries including the making of bricks. Mud from the brick fields of Somers Town was mixed with the ash, cinders and rubbish from the dust heaps, recycling the discarded detritus and dirt of London into the material from which the expanding city was built.

If you would like to be part of this project, you can pick up a dust envelope from the Wellcome Collection, visit www.wellcomecollection.org/laidtorest, email donateyourdust@upprojects.com or call UP projects on 0207 377 9677.

The bricks will be made over the next five months, and go on show in the spring.

Art, it gets weirder by the day.