Colour Bleeding into Sorrow and Joy

As an artist working primarily with sculpture, I ask how colour might evoke new sensibilities where ethical, non-subjective dimensions, bring us into deeper relations with the world. Consideration is given to how Deleuze’s thought on colour might prove more than an explication of art as sensation, precept and affect to become an ethical encounter with life through which to build new capacities for imagining and a world to come. In the week before Christmas 2023 I am in Athens. Television images screen the IDF invasion of Gaza. While wandering through the Acropolis Museum I wonder how the stains of the red pigment hematite (from the Greek word for blood: haima) on the drapery of an ancient marble sculpture might translate vision into a form of touching so that when seeing, on a screen, images of a woman in Gaza holding a dead infant in a bloodstained shroud, I might better pay attention. Not to aestheticise suffering by reducing it merely to a red stain on white cloth. Not to see it as an inevitable outcome of violence, a generality, but rather to let the specificity of sorrow and pain in this image seep into my own flesh. I experiment with materials, form and colour to make a sculpture installation that touches on the capacity of small children in Gaza to create momentary milieus of joy and optimism from gleaned scraps of rubbish and the environment.