Fall Painting

Unframed ready to hang I start with the way in which pigments leave material colour across human history and geography leaving traces of our interactions. The projects chosen have resonance with the now. The form of the work is abstract spaces to fall into. I make oil paints by hand from the relevant pigments. This piece has copper edges, referencing the copper bottoming of ships at the time. This piece is from the Captured Ships Collection: I looked through The Admiralty papers at the National Archive in Kew London, to find pigments in ships captured by privateers during the Anglo Dutch Wars.This piece is made using fair trade indigo pigment hand mixed into oil paint by the artist. It is part of the Captured Ships Collection made using pigments that are listed in the holds of ships captured by privateers during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1760s-70s. The research was carried out using the National Archive at Kew in London, where the admiralty papers are stored. The most commonly listed pigment in the privateered ships was indigo as it was so valuable, and because the most fought over trading route in these wars was the transatlantic one. Indigo was a product of slavery. Inspired by Turner’s Slave ship I have researched the pigments imported into St Katharine docks at the time of the abolitionist movement, and found indigo, a slave trade product, making it a colour of exploitation as well as beauty. I am always looking in these points of change for relevant echoes of our current flux. The form my work takes is abstract spaces, spaces to fall into to get lost and to remember. I owe a debt to twentieth Century artists for the freedom to play in these colour fields, to Rothko and Frankenthaler, to Kandinsky, to Sonia Delaunay and their breakthroughs with colour as substance. But also to the unnamed Church painters of the Middle ages for whom pigments had their own symbolism. Technically the medieval dislike of palette mixing, which was a question of material interference, echoed for me in retaining the integrity of a pigment for the story which it holds. And to the developments of oil painting by the Northern Renaissance artists and into the Southern Renaissance, and the technical traditions of glazing which allow me to layer and lends me understanding of paint as a suspension of pigments which can be layered like strata. My understanding and expression come through the exploration of these colour traces of our thought and history and the way in which the material holds its own story. That we must remember our human story, how we got here, how this society came into being and what the costs were is a given. There is a sense in which these colours hold more than the formal record, they hold nuance and space for connection, for potential and extant symbolism and for the stories never told.