Collection: 'Nuisance Dust' – Hugh Byrne

'Nuisance Dust'

07.10.2026 - 14.11.2026

The phrase came from the side of a box of soft pastels: a manufacturer's warning, the kind of small print most of us read past without registering. Instead, Hugh Byrne noticed something and kept it.

"Nuisance Dust is a phrase I saw on a box of soft pastels, I liked it enough to keep it, without really knowing what I would use it for. That's fairly typical of how this work has developed. I tend to collect things along the way. Materials, techniques, ideas, marks and words. I hold onto them until I find somewhere they can fit, a point in a process that I follow with interest to see where it may lead."

This exhibition marks and names the residue of making, the fine particulate shed by a material in use, which is ordinarily something to be wiped away. That Byrne should find in it a phrase worth keeping says much about the sensibility behind this body of work. His is a practice attentive to what would otherwise go unseen or be dismissed; the accidental trace left on the studio floor. In his hands these become not debris but departure points, evidence that inspiration is rarely found in the grand gesture and more often in what lies quietly at its edges.

There is a whimsy to this way of working, but it would be a mistake to read it as lightness alone. The works in Nuisance Dust hold a series of productive paradoxes. They are at once elementary and elemental: built from the most basic units of mark-making (line, smudge, layer, erasure), yet preoccupied with the fundamental behaviour of material itself. Their playfulness is sustained by a seriousness of craft, and the apparent ease of a composition is underwritten by years of accumulated skill and judgement. Play, in Byrne’s context, is a discipline.

Central to the exhibition is a sense of revelation. Byrne's surfaces are worked, covered, and worked again; pigment is laid down and then partially lifted, scraped back, or dispersed, so that earlier decisions surface through later ones. Making becomes a process of unmasking, in which the image is not imposed so much as uncovered, and each work carries the record of its own discovery. What remains visible is not only the final arrangement but the path taken to reach it.

That path is not predetermined. Byrne describes following a process "with interest to see where it may lead," and the work bears out an attitude of allowance and openness: a willingness to yield to the material and let it set the terms. This is path-finding rather than plotting. Its logic is one of adherence, of listening closely to what pastel, graphite, or paint wants to do, and accepting the dust, the drift, and the unintended mark as part of the work rather than interference with it.

In Nuisance Dust, Hugh Byrne’s chromatic range, in tandem with select monochromatic registers, lean on tone, texture, density, and the subtle gradations between light and dark. The restriction is revealing. His practice evidences compositions that rely wholly on the structural intelligence of the mark and the sensitivity of the hand, demonstrating a depth of skill that does not depend on colour to hold the eye.

In Nuisance Dust what emerges is a body of work about attention: to process, to material, and to the small, overlooked things that can, with patience, become the substance of an artwork.

– Mihlali Mabo

EBONY/CURATED