Paul Hazelton is a British artist based in Margate. His dust sculptures are intricately constructed using household dust, cobwebs, hair or cut paper, stuffed toys or other materials. His work often focuses around ontology, myth, decay and creation.

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Paul has exhibited internationally – including in London, New York, Berlin and Buenos Aires. 

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Paul Hazelton sees his work as a by-product of living, the result of a lifelong breakdown of ideas and materials. Brought up in a pristine home, the young Hazelton was only allowed to draw with a pencil in the sterile setting of a covered table, where even the dust of his pencil were swiftly rubbed and cleaned away. And yet, who would have imagined that after exploring every imaginable material, these forbidden particles of dust would later preoccupy his practice - It is as though the dust had finally settled after an age of experimentation. Somehow, as if in a need to return to his origin, to touch base or to be in contact with a surface, Hazelton had
finally found his touchstone.

 

Dust, as it settles on a given surface, transforms that surface into a kind of drawing. Lifting these ‘dust drawings’, Hazelton takes these minute particles of time and reshapes them three-dimensionally. Traces of time are therefore re-appropriated to fit our time, which, moving at such speed seems at odds with the natural rhythm of the world. Hazelton’s method, which is very slow and methodical, slows time. This is especially so in his geometric drawings, which he constructs from finely meshed geometric lines.

 

Where his dust sculptures relate more to a sense of being, his drawings search for the hidden structure of things. The relation between beings and geometry has become a metaphysical quest for Hazelton, trying to understand the human pursuit for interconnectivity and perfection when in the face of decay.