Making Colour
Making Colour is an afternoon symposium of presentations and poetry readings from within the arts and sciences that celebrate the colours of the rainbow. It is also a taster for the forthcoming 2022 Colour & Poetry: A Symposium IV which commemorates International Colour Day and World Poetry Day, 21 March and World Pigment Day, 22 March.
Featured Media
Wednesday 8 December 2021
1–4pm
Making Colour Programme
Welcome - Jo Volley
Colours passing through us Marge Piercy read by Latifah A. Stranack
Red: Sara Borga
The Welding Class poem written and performed by Fabian Peake
Orange: Nothing Rhymes with Orange Edward Winters
Commentary on Orange poem by John Hollander selected and read by Latifah A. Stranack
Yellow : Saltburn Yellow; 54°34 07.37 N 0°57 42.87 W Onya McCausland
Lead-tin Yellow poem written and performed by George Szirtes
Green: Verdigris Ruth Siddall
the go away green poem written and performed Benjamin Arthur Brown
Blue: How to make a Cyanometer Simson&Volley
The purpose of blue poem written and performed by Sharon Morris
Indigo: My First Indigo Dyed Cloth, a personal memoir Lucille Junkere
Indigo poem by Robin Reynolds read by Latifah A. Stranack
Violet: Red rhymes with blue - impossible violet in the wheel of colours David Dobson
The Violet Passion of Haematite poem written and performed by Sean Borodale
Making Colour Biographies
Biographies in order of appearance
Latifah A Stranack - I was born to parents from the East and the West, I have always been fascinated by cultural hybridity and how this has shaped my senses, and the lens through which I experience the world. In pursuit of a fleeting moment, I contextualise and reframe the presence and absence of family members and my memories through paint.
Sara Borga works as an artist and independent researcher.
Fabian Peake is a painter and writer based in London. His work is concerned with the conflict between the flatness of the wall and the space immediately in front of the wall. Painting is an extremely broad phenomenon. The mist becomes the mountain. His writing locates itself in a poetic equivalence to painting. His poems employ thought processes that are linked more to painting than to literature. Poems are paintings; paintings are poems.
Dr Edward Winters is a writer and artist. He is an elected member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art; and an elected member of the council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He writes widely on art and aesthetics
Dr Onya McCausland is an artist whose research has identified and pioneered a new use for the waste iron solids left behind at UK Coal Authority mine water treatment sites as a sustainable pigment for use in paint.
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, and earlier this year he won the James Tait Black Prize for biography with ‘The Photographer at Sixteen’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Dr Ruth Siddall is a geologist, who applies analytical techniques from the field of Earth sciences to further the understanding of cultural material, primarily pigments, construction and decorative stone, ceramics and plasters. Slade Scientist in Residence 2018-19.
Benjamin Arthur Brown is an artist, poet and curator at Van Gogh House London.
Simson&Volley is a partnership established in 2008, between the artists Henrietta Simson and Jo Volley. Though practicing artists in their own right, the collaborative process allows the subsuming and exploration of shared interests.
Professor Sharon Morris is an artist & poet, Slade Deputy Director and Head of the PhD Programme.
Lucille Junkere is a visual artist exploring legacies of colonisation and the transatlantic slave trade in African Caribbean textile history.
Professor David Dobson is a geologist, mountaineer and print-maker. He is interested in process, whether that is the chain of action linking winter mountaineering to a final image or developing new pigments. He is professor at UCL Earth Sciences and was the first Slade Scientist in Residence 2017-18.
Sean Borodale works as an artist and poet, has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Costa Book Awards, selected as a Next Generation Poet, awarded a Radio Academy Gold Award for Best Feature or Documentary for a documentary poem. Residencies & Fellowships include the Rijksakademie, Bluecoat, Miro Foundation, Trinity College Dublin