Language is a failure in communication.
Objects, ideas and materials are severely limited by symbolic and functional meanings. Colour on the other hand cannot be cannibalised. Colour is innate, not learned. Infants register colours with short wavelengths first, blue being the first, orange and red tones last. Colour precedes our ability to distinguish ourselves. It is the very thing that allows us to learn the difference between an object and a person.
Colour provides a mechanism for us to experience a moment outside of ourselves. Colour allows us to uncouple our idea of “self”. In experiencing colour we must experience a process of change; an undoing and redoing of the self. Oral, written and visual language remain at the centre of our everyday communication, but colour acts at the intersection of subject and object negotiation. Colour surpasses language, it negates material and symbolic meaning. Colour cannot be pinned down, degraded or contained.
Where language can only diminish language, colour offers the potential to experience something indescribable. Colour offers an opening to the viewer as the protagonist, mobilising the production of meaning in the work. To create a temporal dimension that isn’t limited by materiality or “objectness”, or the “self”.