Grounding: What Happened Today?
We had a lecture from DS exploring the history and science of colour and the perception of colour in cultural settings. I felt confident with most of the material so went on a deep dive/ rabbit hole
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Colour as Pure, Internal Fact: I researched the concept of 'olo', a colour generated by isolating the medium-spectrum cones in the eye. This theoretical, intense turquoise/arsenic hue represents a clean, biological truth about human perception. This immediately felt deeply connected to my thought processes.
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Colour as Expensive, Forgotten History: I examined the material history of pigments, particularly the extinct dye from the sea snails that produced Tyrian purple. The striking irony is that these same sea snails are now commonly and silently eaten as food in the Mediterranean, with no cultural recognition of their precious, imperial past.
My most important personal realisation was that, for me, colour and thought are experienced as a single, unified process. Do I experience more synesthesia than most? Do most people not see/feel colour with science fact, numbers, etc? Do I see or feel colour?
The Core Conflict and Meaning
This unification of colour and thought creates a vital tension in my work, which is defined by the conflict between:
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Purity vs. Burden: The pursuit of 'olo' is the search for a pure, internal idea—a cognitive absolute, untouched by external cost. Conversely, the snail pigment represents the burden of history and material ethics. Its transition from a symbol of power to an unremarkable food item highlights how aesthetic value and cultural memory can be utterly erased. disposable - can colour only happen once?
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The Subjective Absolute: Because I experience colour as thought, 'olo' is not just science; it is a pure concept that exists in my mind. The snail's story, however, reminds me that every material I use carries a physical and often tragic history that cannot be ignored. Death anyone?
My practice, therefore, is about holding the gap between a colour that is a clean neurological truth and a colour that is a messy, culturally loaded historical fact.
Materialising: Next Steps
My primary idea here is that my artwork must act as a translator /physically construct my consciousness, making the internal unity of colour and thought visible, while ensuring this translation reveals the contrast between neurological purity and material history. No small feat!!
The next phase of my studio work will be dedicated to formally articulating this tension:
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Developing the Colour-Thought Code? What are my studio practises around colour? Can i do the opposite? like 010 - binary on and off.
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Articulating the Tension in Materials: Maybe think layered colour, immersive colour, emergent colour, expansive colour... scale and colour - are they important to me?
The critical question guiding my work is: If my colours are my thoughts, how do I visually structure a single piece of work to simultaneously communicate both the clarity of my internal idea and the difficult history of the material used to express it? Is it relevent at the time of making or just in sourcing the developing the studio recipe'
