Sonia Leimer: Cosmic Dust

The Jencks Foundation presents Cosmic Dust, a new site-specific exhibition at The Cosmic House by Vienna-based artist Sonia Leimer.

In response to the themes of The Cosmic House in London and building on her previous research, Leimer’s new work explores the migratory system of “cosmic dust.” While this dust obscures our view into outer space when observed through the telescope, its microscopic image became an important source for scientists to study the formation of our solar system. Each year, thousands of tons of this cosmic matter fall to Earth’s surface. These tiny particles, often magnetic and dark in colour, are also known as micrometeorites. Smaller than 0.1mm they surround us everywhere in our human environment. Over the past year, Leimer has been collecting dust from the roof of The Cosmic House and with the support of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, she analysed the collected material to uncover a fascinating array of “cosmic dust.”

Through microscope photography, Leimer captured these minute particles, using them as inspiration for her “Dust Buddies” sculptures made of bronze, aluminum and glass. The sculptures, which Leimer places in the Architecture Library of The Cosmic House, bring into view something that is typically invisible, and which connects the human and the cosmic scales. They engage in a dialogue with the ideas imbued in Jencks' designs for the house, seeking meaning in the cosmos and bringing together references to recent discoveries in science with a rich history of cultural and spiritual metaphors of the universe.

In addition to the sculptures, Leimer presents a new film that records the vast scalar shifts of the project; a microscopic journey across the domestic landscape of The Cosmic House, the petri dishes in the laboratories of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and the vast symbolic landscape created by Maggie Keswick and Charles Jencks in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Portrack, Scotland. 

Sonia Leimer said: “For an entire year, I explored a Petri dish filled with dust from the roof of The Cosmic House. During this time, I learned to use a microscope and became fascinated by the diverse materials I found, ranging from urban dust to ancient cosmic dust particles—the oldest material we can find on Earth. This dust, like the house itself, connects nature, the city, and the cosmos.”

Eszter Steierhoffer, Director of the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House said: “Leimer’s exhibition takes a microscopic lens to The Cosmic House and zooms in to the smallest details of our physical enviroment in order to capture its broadest cosmic context. We are excited to host this new work that brings artistic research in a transdisciplinary dialogue with science and reveals our cosmic interconnectedness.”

Feeding into the Jencks Foundation’s laboratory programme, this work is the first in the new thematic series on “Post-Modern Cosmology’; a theme which Charles Jencks developed both in his designs and through a series of seminars co-hosted with Maggie Keswick Jencks in Portrack, Scotland, to explore meaning in the cosmos in the intersection of science, religion and ecology. Following the launch of Leimer’s exhibition, the 2025 programme of the Jencks Foundation will be devoted to the further exploration and contemporary reinterpretations of this theme.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Phileas—The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art with the generous support of legero united | con-tempus.eu.