Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI
Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI, 21st - 22nd March 2024, is a cross- and inter-disciplinary two-day virtual event held by the Slade School of Fine Art, in celebration of International Colour Day, World Poetry Day and World Pigment Day. The symposium hosts a range of speakers representing the arts and humanities, science, and industry, drawing upon knowledge from within and outside of the UCL community.
Featured Media
Created during workshop by Ian Rowlands
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©the artist
Symposium Director: Jo Volley
This years confirmed speakers include:
Mataio Austin Dean / Miranda Lynn Barnes & Stephen Paul Wren / Sean Borodale / Jane Bustin / Mark Cann / Egidja Čiricaitė / Sara Choudhrey / Rose Davey / David Dobson / Duncan Greig / Lavinia Harrington / Brece Honeycutt / Andy Leak / Alexandra Loske / Sharon Morris / Stephanie Nebbia / Vanessa Otero / Andy Pankhurst / Chris Kirubi / Sarah Pettitt / Vaishali Prazmari / Rachel Reynolds & Jo Volley / Robert Rivers / Rose Shuckbrugh / Kimberly Selvaggi / Ruth Siddall / Henrietta Simson / Kirsty Sinclair Dootson/ Paul Smith / Jessie Stevenson / George Szirtes / Estelle Thompson/ Piers Veness /Edward Winters / Yannis Ziogas
Free, book via Eventbrite.
Online exhibition
The Nomenclature of Colours III, online 21-22 March 2024
Thursday 21 March: International Colour Day & World Poetry Day
10.00 Introduction and welcome: Jo Volley, artist and symposium director.
10.05 Keynote: Colour & Poetry in DNA - Professor Duncan Greig.
Duncan Greig, is currently Scientist-in-Residence at the Slade School of Fine Art, and professor of genetics in the Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE). His main research method is experimental evolution.
10.30 Feather Green, Yellow Light, Double Red, Blue Stripe: Conversations on Colour within the Collection of Tate Britain - Rose Davey
Rose Davey is an artist and writer living in London. Recent shows include Same Same, co- curated alongside Sid Motion, Sid Motion Gallery London, 2022, Until the World became the Walls all Around, Canopy Collections, Van Gogh House, London 2021, Conversations on Colour, Cooke Latham Gallery, London, 2020.
Rose is the director of Corner7, a project space in Camden showing a range of artists and host to various talks, workshops and events.
10.50 From the Library of Colour Women Colour and Cruelty: Honoring artist and colour theorist Carry van Biema (1881-1942) - Dr Alexandra Loske
Dr Alexandra Loske is an art historian, writer, museum curator, and a Research Associate at the University of Sussex. She has a particular interest in the role of women in colour history. She has recently published Mary Gartside c.1755-1819: Abstract Visions of Colour (Thomas Heneage, 2024) and The Book of Colour Concepts (TASCHEN, 2024).
11.10 Magic Inks - Vaishali Prazmari
British artist Vaishali Prazmari’s multidisciplinary work incorporates elements from various cultures including the Indo-Persian miniatures and Chinese painting of her multiple heritages. Vaishali holds degrees from both the Slade School of Fine Art and the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts and holds an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies (UCL) specialising in floating islands.
11.30 Michel-Lévy Color Chart - Professor David Dobson
David Dobson is a geologist, mountaineer and artist. He is also a professor at UCL Earth Sciences and was the first Slade Scientist in Residence 2017-2018.
11.40 Cezanne and the autonomy of pictorial colour - Professor Paul Smith
Paul Smith is professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. He has published extensively on Cezanne and colour and is presently co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Colour (with Judith Mottram)
He held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship from 2021-23 for a project on Cezanne and the psychology of perception.
12.00 Liz Rideal
Liz Rideal has exhibited widely in museums and galleries in Europe and America. Her work is held in public collections including Tate and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is also a Professor at the Slade School.
12.20 Poetry Reading - Sharon Morris
Sharon Morris, Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, researches the relation between words and images, through her poetry collections, artist books and artworks in various media.
12.40 Ask the Chemist: Q&A session with Mark Cann
This is an opportunity to ask Mark Cann, Technical Excellence Manager, Colart, questions related to the chemistry and manufacturer of painting materials. Questions to be taken through the chat.
Afternoon session hosted Stephanie Nebbia
14.00 What is the chemical makeup of colour? And how can this be translated into poetic form? - Dr Miranda Lynn Barnes and Dr Stephen Paul Wren
Dr Miranda Lynn Barnes and Dr Stephen Paul Wren are collaborating on a second project bringing together the structures of organic chemistry and the creation of new poetic forms, called Chroma. Pairs of organic dyes in every colour of the rainbow inform the work, including dyes such as brilliant green, indigo, and methylene blue. This project builds on an earlier work, Formulations (March 2022, Small Press/Tangent Books), which resulted in a pamphlet of poems and new poetic forms created from chemical molecules involved in the processes of biosynthesis. Formulations has been a pioneering development towards a theory of chemical poetics, engaging with poetic form that deeply applies the elements of molecular structure. Chroma carries this onwards into new territory, more complex molecules, and celebration of colour in the world of human life. Future publication is expected of this new collection in 2024 or early 2025.
14.20 Curvilinear Roundels - Analysing and reconstructing examples from Islamic Spain - Sara Choudhrey
Dr Sara Choudhrey is a London-based artist and researcher, exploring themes of material culture, heritage and society. She references historical collections, archives and architecture with a specialism in Islamic art and digital design.
14.40 Poetry Reading - George Szirtes
George Szirtes is a poet and translator. Author of some 30 books, he has won various prizes for his work in both fields, including The T S Eliot Prize for Poetry and the International Booker Prize for translation.
15.00 To see and To sea - Jane Bustin
Jane Bustin, born 1964, London, studied at Portsmouth Polytechnic and lives and works in London. Her practice spans three decades of single works in painting and ceramic, as well as installation, text, film and performance. Bustin’s work is in several international public and private collections.
15.20 Poetry Reading - Mataio Austin Dean
Born in 1996 to a Guyanese mother and an English father, and educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, Mataio Austin Dean’s practice extends across visual art, poetry, music, and activism. He creates images, often intaglio prints, which explore England and Guyana’s darkly intertwined histories, throwing light upon moments of resistance whilst unearthing stories of coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Through performance, he probes the relationship between printmaking and orality, interrogating the temporality and political potency of images, symbols, and sigils.
15.40 REDiscover Workshop: a dialogue between artistic and scientific experimentation - Dr Vanessa Otero
Dr Vanessa Otero is a Researcher at the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the NOVA School of Science and Technology, Lisbon (Portugal). Her research crosses the disciplinary boundaries of technical art history and conservation science, aiming to increase knowledge on artists' materials by combining the study of their historical production, colour stability and analytical characterisation, ultimately adding to better conservation and authentication procedures. https://sites.google.com/fct.unl.pt/rediscover
16.00 Black, White and Him' - On Psychoanalytic Commons in a Liberated Palestine - Lujain Mansour
An exploration of deep romantic longing in tumultuous apartheidic dynamics through ink and poetry.
Lujain Támer Mansour is a multidisciplinary artist from East Jerusalem. Her practice is centred around navigating cyclical death and cosmic rebirth under the Palestinian sun, primarily through the context of idle psychoanalysis. The crux of her work deals with the nativity of longing for the 'land of origin' as a lover rather than a mother.
16.10 Poetry Reading Benjamin Arthur Brown
Benjamin Arthur Brown is an artist, poet and curator at Van Gogh House, London. He also has a radio show called A LEG AND A CHIN and is on RTM.FM. It comes out every four weeks and the archive can be found on Mixcloud if you search A LEG AND A CHIN.
16.20 Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust - Estelle Thompson
Estelle Thompson is a British abstract artist and Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. She has exhibited internationally, curated exhibitions in Europe and the Caribbean and received several public built environment commissions in the UK. Her artworks are held in major public collections, were included in Phaidon’s Painting Today and in 2001, a monograph, Estelle Thompson, was published by Merrell.
6pm - Talk ‘n draw with Andy Pankhurst
Photo credit: Andy Pankhurst
Thursday 21 March, 6–8pm
FREE, separate ticket required, please book via Eventbrite.
Suggested materials: A4 or A3 sketchbook or papers of your choice or have to hand that can be smooth; textured, white, off-white, coloured greys, etc , coloured pencils or; crayons, pastel pencils, chalk pastels, oil pastels, felt tip pens and markers of at least the three primary colours of Red, Yellow and Blue.
However, ideally within the basic palette of primary colours it is highly recommended to include two values of each primary that have a bias towards either a warm or cool i.e. a cool purple red, a warm orange red, a warm orange yellow, a cool primary or green yellow, a cool green blue, and a warm purple blue (please also feel free to include all other colours as you wish).
Plus, if appropriate a kneadable putty rubber or hard eraser and pencil sharpener.
Friday 22 March: World Pigment Day
©the artist
10.00 World Pigment Day’s 4th Anniversary - Welcome with Jo Volley & Ruth Siddall, founders
10.05 The revival of colours from the past - Stephanie Nebbia & Pierre Sanchez
Many beautiful colours from the artists palette were either toxic or fugitive or difficult to procure. The arrival of synthetic alternatives working with the archives from Winsor & Newton, offers new versions of Tyrian Purple, George Field’s Orange, Cinnabar Green, Mineral Grey, Ultramarine ash and Ostwald’s Grey. Providing beautiful contributions to the artists palette. Stephanie Nebbia is an artist, curator and resident artist Global Fine Art Collective, Colart. Pierre Sanchez, is Ingénieur chimiste, I&D, Colart.
10.20 JV/RR/MI/XXIV - Rachel Reynolds & Jo Volley
Rachel is a postgraduate conservation student at the IoA. She is the current Conservator in Residence at the Slade and a ceramics conservation intern at the British Museum. Her areas of interest include the conservation of modern and contemporary art as well as collaborative relationships between conservators and artists.
Jo Volley is an artist, Director, Colour & Poetry and Artist in Residence UCL IoA, Conservation Dept.
10.40 Mental Images in Painting and in Poetry - Dr Edward Winters
Edward Winters studied painting at the Slade, before writing his PhD in philosophy at UCL. His latest book is Architectural Aesthetics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. He is a writer and artist.
11.00 In conversation with Rilke’s Book of Hours - Lavinia Harrington
Lavinia is an Italian-British artist, presently studying at the Slade School of Fine Art (Painting MFA, 2022-2024. Lavinia has worked in arts education for over a decade and graduated from Oxford University in History of Art (BA Hons.), completing her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
11.10 Reading - Rose Shuckburgh
Rose Shuckburgh’s practise encompasses painting, printmaking and poetry, cataloguing a personal relationship to the natural world. She depicts significant forms as vessels of feeling, placed within a charged stillness. Her practise catalogues an emotional relationship to land, using colour to capture the sensation of forms she encounters in the natural landscape.
11.20 Poetry Reading - Chris Kirubi
Chris Kirubi is a poet and artist whose work presses at mutable and promiscuous dalliances of language and image. Their debut collection titled Wildplassen is forthcoming with the87press. Chris is also a lecturer at the Slade.
11.40 The colour spectrum of pollen: a talk inspired by a conversation with Kim Selvaggi - Daren Caruana
Daren Caruana is Professor of Physical Chemistry at UCL Chemistry. His research is mainly focused on interaction of electric charge and chemistry in various forms. In 2020-21 he was Slade Scientist in Residence.
12.00 Engaging feeling: the ‘tactile imagination’ and the landscape image Dr Henrietta Simson
Henrietta Simson completed an MA in painting (2007), and a practice-related PhD (2017) at the Slade. Her doctoral thesis explored landscape through medieval and early Renaissance visual forms, the materiality of the image, and Renaissance perspective's role in the history of representational image-making. She is currently researching the spiritual and material implications of caves, mines and wilderness in contemporary and medieval landscapes.
12.20 Ochres & British Folklore - Lucy Mayes
Lucy Mayes is a pigment maker from the South of England. Her colours are made from waste streams and Anthropocene debris. She teaches pigment making and hopes to re-orientate our connections to colour; through the creation of intimate relationships with matter formed through embodied making & processing of raw materials into colour.
12.40 Ask the Conservator - Kimberly Selvaggi
This is an opportunity to ask questions related to good painting practice. Questions will be taken through the chat. Kimberly Selvaggi is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Integrative Anatomy (CIA), UCL. She was previously the Scientist-in-Residence (2022-23) and the first Conservator-in-Residence (2020-22) at the Slade School of Fine Art. Kim will be doing her PhD at the Slade, commencing Fall 2024, focusing on dyes, paints and pigments and their use in art as well as in conservation.
14.00 Colour as perception, colour as reality, color as projection - Yannis Ziogas
Yannis Ziogas is a painter exploring areas of visual expression. He is Professor at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia and organizes the walking process Visual March to Prespa.
14.20 River Paper: algae, aquatic plants and paper-making - Robert Rivers & Izzy Bishop
Robert Rivers is an artist who is currently exploring the links between landscape and paper-making. He studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, (2002 - 2005) and later completed an MFA at the Slade School of Art, UCL, (2011 - 2013). He was Honorary Research Fellow for the Material Research Project at the Slade (2021-2023).
Izzy Bishop is an ecologist who researches the ways rivers respond to pollution and environmental change. She completed her PhD in Physical Geography at UCL in 2018 and now works as a lecturer in the People and Nature Lab at UCL East.
14.40 Reading Sean Borodale
Sean Borodale is an artist and poet. His debut collection Bee Journal was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and Costa Book Award. Other collections include the much-praised Inmates, Asylum and Human Work. He is currently Hon Research Fellow in Print.
15.00 Colour and Spatiality: Adolphe Appia's theatre designs, Albers' Squares, Murals and Installations - Piers Veness
Piers Veness (Portsmouth, 1974) is an abstract geometric painter whose work is informed by the minimalism and spatiality of artists such as Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, and the groundbreaking theatre designer Adolphe Appia. Fascinated by the suggestive power of line as communicative language, Veness’ work considers the monumental and its connection with the passing of time. Veness received an MA in Theatre Design at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and a BA Fine Art at the University of Northampton.
15.20 In search of memories, materials and Munch - Latifah A Stranack
Latifah A Stranack is a Slade graduate who paints landscapes and the women she imagines in them as goddesses, symbolising and celebrating womanhood. She creates her heroines to explore her memories, mythology, and contemporary issues in the modern world.
15.40 Seeing Red in Technicolor: Materials, Techniques and Politics in Colour Film - Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a Lecturer in Film and Media at UCL. Her work explores the politics of making images in colour. Her first book The Rainbow's Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity (PMC/Yale, 2023) considers how new colour media technologies transformed the way Britain saw itself and its Empire from the nineteenth century. Her research on dyeing film strips, making colour cosmetics, and grinding pigments has been published variously in Screen, Film History, and British Art Studies.
16.00 Blue and green cannot be seen - Dr Robyn Pender
In nature, blue and green envelope us: the colours of the sky, the colours of water, the colours of the trees and grass and of so many flowers. Blue sapphires and green emeralds. But until the new synthetic pigments of the 19th century, true blue and green paints were either fugitive, or rare and incredibly expensive: a fact that frustrated many, many generations of artists! But why is nature so good at producing blue and green, except as a pigment? Join us for a deep dive into an area of physics that is anything but dry! Dr Robyn Pender has spent her career combining physics, art and history, primarily through the conservation of wall paintings and buildings. She is fascinated by the way over deep time art has been shaped by the materials available, and what science has to tell us about that availability.
16.20 We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors - Kanad Chakrabarti
Kanad Chakrabarti is a PhD candidate in the Art Department at Goldsmiths College, UoL. He researches the impact of synthetic computation on humanity’s long-term trajectory. He has exhibited at institutions including the Queens Museum (New York), ICA (London), and CAC (Vilnius), and holds a MA (Painting, Slade School, UCL) and a BSc (Electrical/Computer Engineering, MIT). He can be found @ukc10014 and ukc10014.org.
16.30 Desire lines collapse: painting, poem, pigment, place - Sarah Pettitt
Committed to folly and resigned to failure, Sarah Pettitt attempts to identify the unidentifiable through material anecdote. Influenced by parallels between pre-modern and modern artistic modalities, her work focuses on cycles and collapse in terms of belief and site. Sarah has a MA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL 2011-2013 and was Honorary Research Fellow for the Material Research Project, The Tyranny of Surface, 2015/16.
16.50 Culled colour combinations - Brece Honeycutt
Brece Honeycutt, a multi-media artist, uses research as a material for her history and nature-based works. She works in spoken word, video, installation and works on paper. Brece's website: https://brecehoneycutt.com/ .
17.10 Colourful Stone: the Art of Pietre Dure - Dr Ruth Siddall
Ruth Siddall is a geologist and co-author of the Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments. She is co-founder of World Pigment Day and in 2018-19 Slade Scientist in Residence.
End of symposium
