It turned out that I was exceptionally well suited to weaving. Weaving took all my practical and pragmatic tendencies and tethered them neatly up with my naïve and infinite ideas about art and creativity. It channeled and focused me in a way painting never would have. On graduation from the Royal College of Art in the summer of 1997, I set up my studio and started making hand dyed and woven, wall-based artworks. The climate at that moment in London’s art schools was one of minimalism and technical
innovation. Fine Art seemed mainly conceptual and controversial – Saatchi’s Sensation show was about to open a month later – and I found there was little interest in colour or craftsmanship. Everyone told me it would be impossible to hand weave artworks and even harder to get anyone to buy them; but, over the next 24 years, I was able to gradually establish a viable way of working. It became clear that the core of my art practice was focused around colour.
Something that came intuitively to me – the interaction of dynamic colour – propelled my work forward. I saw that the most significant thing about my work was always the colour: this was the element that the viewer responded to first and most deeply. In 2009 I was invited to co-curate an exhibition about colour in London at the Aram Gallery by its then curator, Daniel Charny, who consequently coined the title (of the show) and the phrase ‘Significant Colour’. We agreed that across fine art and design the significance of colour was often overlooked, even though it usually the first thing with which a viewer connects. Our visual sense hits us way before touch and smell. The colour of something is often the very first thing we register when looking. It was what I had experienced with my own work.
Colour is a deeply emotive subject. For most of us it is also highly personal: we each have a unique response to colour that we develop internally through experience and association. How we feel about certain color often has more to do with what our childhood bedroom walls were painted than anything else. And experiences associated with certain color, whether good and bad, affect our response. Josef Albers famously showed 100 students the exact same shade of red, and the resulting
descriptions implied 100 different shades of that colour. We all see and relate to colors individually, thereby making it an almost impossible subject to predict or define with any certainty. What can be said is that colour is deeply significant for human beings. How significant remains debatable; but our desire to place colour in and around our environments, on our bodies and the outside of our dwellings, has been in strong evidence from the beginning of mankind’s journey into consciousness. In western thinking of the late-20th century colour and its potential gravitas seems to have diminished, become secondary, decorative, as it deemed an object or artwork less serious or intellectual than its less chromatic counterparts.
However, more recently, there seems a desire to readdress this balance. Especially on the façade of buildings, a most visible renaissance is taking place where intelligent, serious colour is being used to serve form and function. A more refined appreciation and understanding of colour as a tool is, in effect, shaping how we use it. Recognising the importance of not just the ‘chroma’ (shade) of a colour, but its ‘saturation’ (depth and brightness) and ‘value’ (lightness or darkness), can enhance its role within art and design.
Colour is deeply significant for human beings. How significant remains debatable; but our desire to place colour in and around our environments, on our bodies and the outside of our dwellings, has been in strong evidence from the beginning of mankind’s journey into consciousness.
countryside, in any place outside of a major city
really, it becomes the preoccupation of your life. You are vested, invested, in the property and its success. And that investment extends to the community around you.
104