Artworks

Artist Notes

The concept for this body of work was conceived in Mexico of Spring 2023, while at the Arquetopia Foundation Art Residency. While in attendance, I learned traditional methods of pigment extraction. As a key component of the programming, required reading and discussion took me on a deep dive into colour— its history, meaning, and origin.

The philosophy of aesthetics is, in essence, the study of perspective. In my practice, emphasis is placed on challenging viewpoints — both, in the physical locations I visit and work, and in the mark-making techniques I implement. Aesthetics considers sensory perception and cognitive responses, expressed through judgements of taste.  This work examines the representation of shape and colour as visual devices, and examines means of production with a focus on time.

Colour surrounds us. With an understanding in colour literacy, we can appreciate the fundamental role it plays in our lives, affecting our emotions and interactions. Historically it was common for viewers and Painters alike to be able to recognize the symbolism, value, and origin of a colour. Colours held symbolism apart from brand recognition, and were associated with mythology and geographic origin. Scarcity, popularity, and geographic location can determine a colour's economic value. Colour is a natural resource, derived from plants, animals, and minerals. Specific colours are sourced from specific regions of the world.

During the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, Diego Velázquez was commissioned to paint the royal family. The renowned painting, Las Meninas, depicts a snapshot of a court scene, at the time controversial for its departure from traditional portraiture, and later celebrated for its complex composition and illusion. In the essay, The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay, Byron Ellsworth Hamann provides further insight to the symbolism in the painting when the artist chose to include a specific red colour paint. The red curtains reflected in the mirror at the back of the room, and the red vessel that Infanta Margarita is reaching for, are both derivatives of Cochineal. The dye is extracted from the insect cochineal (Dactylopius coccus), which lives on the nopal cactus in Mexico and South and Central America. It has a recorded use in Pre-Columbian Mexico as being a dominate pigment in mural painting and textile dying. Colonization of MesoAmerica lead to its globalization, ultimately making its way into the hands of Velázquez. The paintings use of this vibrant hue of red, reads as a clue to Spain’s dominant position in the world. The use of Cochineal symbolizes wealth extraction and colonization. It reveals transAtlantic connections, bridging the labourers in New Spain with the Spanish court in Madrid, highlighting its position in the global economy. Viewers today would not necessarily know to look for connections such as these, but in 1956 when the painting was completed, the Crown and its audience would have been adept in such analogy.

Nowadays colour pigments are, more often than not, made in a laboratory or calibrated on a screen. Viewers don’t consider the origin of a colour, but have more ease identifying links to popular brands, sports teams or nationalities. Colour offers less to read into, but is quicker to relate to.

Colour is arguably the most emotional element in art and design. The application of colour is a manipulative tool. It has the power to evoke feeling. Colour is confronting, subjective, and personal. It is used as a marketing device to develop brand identity. Politics and marketing can alter an impression of a specific colour and create trends. This means that colour associations are flexible and varied. They can rapidly shift and change, depending on the viewer’s geography and place in time.

When the success of Barbie took off in the early 1970s, it was clear that the marketing invention of her bright fuchsia pink accessories and packaging was unlike anything else on the market. Other toy doll companies soon began to imitate the colour, leading to its prevalence in popular culture. This is when girls began to dress in pink. Just decades earlier, it was more likely to see young girls dressed in light blue to resemble the Virgin Mary. And it hadn’t been unusual for baby boys to be dressed in a light pink — a softer version of red, which was a colour of war. The term “redcoats” had been coined in Tudor Ireland to refer to the British military. Their fiery-red jacket had become synonymous with war. The Officer’s uniform was dyed with the expensive and distinctively scarlet colour of the cochineal insect. Whereas the lower-ranked Soldier coats were made from the less costly madder root dye.

Colour allows us to navigate the world and has the power to make things move. Philosopher Walter Benjamin, wrote that adults perceive colour as a “deceptive cloak for individual objects existing in time and space. Where colour provides the contours.”  Colour has the ability to wrap shapes and define a shape, and thus make into an object.

Shape, another element of art and design, is less likely to evoke emotion, and more likely used to create composition and balance. Geometric shapes are historically linked to mathematics, with devised rules and techniques, serving practical uses such as constructing buildings, taking measurements, and surveying land. From shape, symbols and patterns were created. They can be simple or complex, dictated by the properties of the medium used — their capabilities, ease of stacking, bending, taking form. In the book Symbols and Meaning, author Mari Womack states that “the meaning of a symbol is not inherent in the symbol itself, but is culturally learned”.  Akin to a visual language, they are a means of communication. As such, they have the potential for for longevity, but tend to stay localized and relative to specific geographic regions or civilizations.

In the Oaxaca Valley, just a short drive from Teotitlán del Valle, where I studied pigment dying, is the archaeological site of Mitla. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, Mitla was an ancient city, known then as Mictlán, which translated from Nahuatl meaning ‘Place of the Dead’ or ‘Underworld’, an indication of the site’s original function. Zapotec patterning is survived on interior and exterior walls of the ancient ruins. Lavish fretwork ornamentation was individually carved from stone and set in place like a jigsaw puzzle, so tightly that mortar was not used, requiring the highest level of craftsmanship. From these stone patterns stories can be deciphered. It is believed that the prominent interlocking spirals on the mosaics represent the rotation of life and death. It tells the story of the lifecycle and their interdependence and connection.

It seems fitting that Zapotec weavers, from the same Oaxaca Valley, are influenced by these ancient patterns and use them as motifs in their textile art and rug making today. Textile has long been intertwined with text and a means to propel a story. In 2018, Yale University hosted an exhibition titled Text and Textile, which explored the intersections of text and textile in literature and politics. Co-curator Katie Trumpener put forward that textiles and written works both “embody, process, or keep alive collective memory and historical experience”. Textiles have always been linked to text, prayers, songs, and myth-making. When Zapotec weavers reference the ancient patterns in their work, they continue and build on the narratives. She goes on to poetically write that “textiles evoke the finitude of life and the expandability of time, the place of individual lives and creators within a larger, longer social fabric”.

Fine craft such as weaving, embroidery, and pottery, among others, are interwoven with time — both, as a means of storytelling and as a time-based medium. The surfaces serve as a means for stories to be filled with symbolic shapes and designs, each stitch acting like its own artesian language. And with each handmade method of making requires acute awareness and slow consideration. Each individual stitch allows the viewer to read seconds of time that went into its production. The mark of human hands can be a tool to trace of human passage and thought.

Story is used to remember and to create permanence. Similar to statues, tapestries are are a way to commemorate. They take simplified forms, motifs, or characters to represent past events. Historic events become stories. And those stories become open to subjective interpretation. With all time-based media, the very presence of time as a condition of making can and will alter the outcome. The further removed from the original story, the more opportunity for the narrative to alter — more details added, others removed. Names are forgotten, stories become fables, exaggerations run wild. Through the act of repetition, one might infer progress and improvement, but as we move further away from the origin, we move further away from the original truth.

These paintings began as a collection of photographs taken as a method of documentation. The photos were snapshots of my time in Oaxaca and a record of the historic walls and carved patterned that I had become captivated. This library of shapes became the foundation for the work. The enlarged and inverted photos were made into stencils and were built upon, reused, manipulated, mixed with transparent layers, and presented under UV light to produce a series of altered copies. The recycled negatives adapted in the printing production, each new print encouraged to create its own, new scene, and as such, each sequence grew further away from its origin. The imagery was defined with coloured pencil and hand-stitched details. These media further propitiate the entanglement of time into the acts of making.

Colour wraps objects
Textile wraps bodies
Outside shells
to hold, protect, define