For this project I focused on the question ‘How can light be used a material’ and was interested by James Turrell’s focus on ‘the thingness of light’.
I interpreted light and colour as the material or tangible aspects of memory. To vividly remember an experience, the memory holds a real colour, light, what have you. Memory’s importance comes from holding a liminal space between permeance and temporality where the light of the memory fades in and out. But this characteristic breaks down when memory can be constantly viewed synthetically, with a consistent screen light. I think constant access to memory via digital image makes it synthetic, giving the colour and light a false stillness.
My project is a painting on textured watercolour paper with acrylic and oil paint with spots of dyed sand on top displayed on the floor.
For the colours which inspired my painting I looked at photographs from 2014 and 15 of me and family in northern California. My memories here are important to me, it’s where my mum’s side of the family is from. When I think of my memories there, they have a distinct feel, smell, colour and light which is all fixed and still.
I wanted the sand to disturb the stillness of the painted colours. Made by eroding rocks and shifting sea, sand constantly moves, I can’t hold it, instead it slips through my fingers. I initially tried to separate the colours of the sand into factions of blue, white, yellow and red. But they mixed and became almost indistinguishable from one another, becoming a blueish grey.
The importance and stillness of colours in my painting is removed by the imperfect and accidental colour of the sand. This acts a metaphor for repairing the light of memory to something temporal versus synthetic and falsely still.