FUTURE PALETTE
The White Room Conversations

26 October 2006

STIG EVANS:

SE: [The paintings on the right] was the stuff I was doing prior to the Bursary. I trained as a conservator and over the last 10 years the conservation of easel paintings has been feeding into my own work. In conservation, often you take slices or cross sections through a painting to reveal the artists' techniques and to understand more about the history of pigments or whether something is original or not original. All these paintings here are developed from paintings in the National Gallery.. from looking at cross sections from them that the NG have taken to reveal how the artists have built up layers of paint to make the final image.

Q: Do you use the same colours as those artist? The actual pigments? The actual colours?

SE: No, I come at it as a conservator and we tend to match colours using a very limited palette. It's really a colour translation.

Q: Does it matter whether we know how you have done it?

SE: In a way, yes. Is not imperative in order to enjoy the painting. If you understand where I am coming from it helps, but it is not necessary to know that I build up layers of colour and so on.

Q: Where did the scientist get involved [in your bursary work]?

SE: At the Colour + Chemisty Symposium [last November] there was a spectrophotometer [SP] on show that is used to measure colour.. The original idea [for my bursary] was to create a series of "hidden" portraits. The idea was to take the emotional side of colour bit further. I used the SP to measure an emotional state. A friend of mine, Simon - in this video - got into a happy state and an angry state and the idea was to measure the colour [of those emotions]. A SP measures outside our visual range into IR and UV, which we can't see. [This is a bit] like in the restoration process where we reveal the underdrawings of old masters by using UV and IR. I measured Simon in various emotional states - angry, happy and upset. I took readings and sent them off to Andrew [Hanson, my science mentor] for analysis. Our visual range is between 400 and 700 and I was looking for things outside that range - but nothing that interesting actually happened. But we did find a colour that Simon went - a transitional colour between happy and angry. That painting over there; "The Mean Difference between Happy and Angry" . . underneath the paint on the left panel .. is the happy portrait of Simon and on the right is the angry portrait of Simon. I used carbon black which is revealed in IR and used a team of conservators to take images of the portraits hidden underneath the white paint. The video [beside the painting] shows the images under the white paint. The two colours in the middle - the orange is the colour between happy and angry and the blue is the colour between angry and happy.

Q: Which part of the project has been the most interesting for you?

SE: Working with Andrew has been amazing and that has broadened my practice and pushed me in directions that I probably wouldn't have gone down. [I've also done some pieces of work] using a SP similar to Andrew's - a Dulux one linked to a paint machine. I took some traditional pigments to the Dulux Trade Centre and they matched it. Then I sprayed the two "matched" colours together.. some matched and some didn't. And there is more to do here which is great. These four paintings are just part of a series.

I also did some research into the psychology behind colour and linked emotions to particular colours and ended up with a series of jars of paint.. So. orange is strength, purple is wisdom, etc. I tried to link this all back to the scientific cross sections, and I have been trying to make it more collaborative with these panels so people can develop their own emotional diaries... you put on lots of layers and then take a sample through the layers and photograph it... like so.

 

DARO MONTAG:

DM: My work [for this exhibition] was going to be about Sherborne.. I thought I'd do tests, take samples etc. But my [recent] work as an artist and ecologist has made me think more about my immediate environment, so it made more sense to do experiments at home [in Cornwall]. What you see here is part of a much larger project that will last as long as I live at this place. It's part of trying to create a distinct and holistic knowledge of a particular place.

It's simply about getting to know my place - the soil, the animals, the birds and the plants. The few inches of topsoil are vital for survival and ecological sustainability, so it made sense to get to know the soil further. What you see here is a small project about our SOIL.

To start I dug five holes in different locations in the garden and analysed the soil. I used a Munsell colour chart, the soil sorters bible, to distinguish between the different soils. I discovered we have 8 distinct colours of soil and the darker it gets the livelier it gets. What interests me most is the organic content [of the soil]. I also used a number of other scientific methods, including the scanning electron microscope and QEM Scan. I was helped by scientists at Camborne School of Mines who have a wealth of knowledge about the geological make up of the earth. However there are many ways to know your world.

My artistic method has been to place photographic film in the five trays under the soil. The microbes in the soil eat into the emulsion of the film. Those images there [in the light box] are the resulting pieces of film. Microbes are essential for maintaining life - without them the universe would collapse - so what I am trying to do in this work is draw attention to their largely unseen activities.

The final piece (This Earth I - X) consists of 10 photographic enlargements made on a microscope of very small sections of these films. Each image is a 1-2 mm view of what's on the film. It's important to appreciate that you are looking at are NOT micro-organisms , instead they are the results of micro organic activity. They are biological etchings, which is why I call them BIOGLYPHS. I shall probably produce far more pieces of work from those 5 strips of film. Possibly up to about 200 images. They will all be totally different.

I have worked closely with biologists before, but what was new this time is that I worked so closely with SOIL and learnt so much about soil from a geologist's point of you. That extended my knowledge. Also, the project has made me think much more about concentrating my art practice in my home environment. There are projects coming out of this to do with the vicinity where I live. For example I am now considering installing a wind turbine, as art.....

Q: What sort of period of time are we talking about with those 10 pieces of work.

DM: A month.

Q: How do you know these effects are not caused by something else in the soil. something chemical?

DM: It could be a combination.. but it is definitely predominantly organic. Because looking under the microscope you can [often] actually living organisms, such as a nematode, tunnelling through the surface of the film. Although film is thin to us it has great depth to a microbe. It becomes an ecosystem.

Ken Gadd (Daro's science mentor): It has to be organic. The film itself is gelatin and it's a food ticket for the organisms. The gelatin has 3 different dyes, they [the organisms] unwittingly absorb the dyes ... ..

Q: There is an art-science thing here where science has a different outcome or purpose from an art purpose... is there a tension here for you?

DM: Artists and scientists use different methods to find out different things. My interest I suppose is making physical that which is there but not seen. Art gives us space to think. I am interested in using art as a tool to help us think about the world... Ken Gadd: Scientists would ask different questions of investigation ... scientists are interested in measurement..

 

BALINT BOLYGO:

BB: This [area] is quite similar to my studio - I have lots of gadgets and equipment in my studio and it looks more like a physics lab than a sculpture studio really. I collect bits of equipment, sometime from chemistry labs and look at it from a visual point of view. I'm interested in movement and how those natural movements - whether its gravity or centrafugal force - can be traced to produce something visual. So in a sense its quite similar to the way Daro [Montag] works - tapping into something quite natural and trying to produce a trace. You're not quite sure what is going to happen but as an artist you can always tweak it and look for the more visual results. So you'll see some experiments - some of them relate to workshops I've done with schools , and then there is the NITINOL thing which is to do with the bursary. I proposed to research Nitinol - nickel titanium alloy, aka flexinol or memory metal - and there are several alloy types of this composite, and super flexible alloys which you would have seen in glasses - the ones that crunch up and then spring back into shape. It is also used in medicine a lot making tools for operating with. The other type is the memory metal. In industry it's used as a muscle wire which I have used here. In medicine it is used for making stents - they lazer cut these tiny tubular meshes which they deliver into narrowing of arteries through keyhole surgery and the body heat will activate the nitinol mesh and it will expand and push the narrowing out. And it being titanium the body doesn't reject it.

Nitinol has two crystaline states - if you heat up the nitinol it will change from one state to another and each one has different physical properties - sizes - it can change from long to short and you can make it memorize certain shapes. I've used .175 mm nitinol - that's close to hair thickness size - and you can make it lift relatively heavy objects.

So for the bursary I proposed to use the nitinol to explore its kinetic potential and making a large-ish shape changing object. If you heat nitinol - either using a hair dryer, turning your heating on or passing a current through it - if you pass a low voltage current through it the resistance in the wire can generate enough heat for it to change chrystaline states and this is when the physical change happens - quite rapidly - and you can harness this change . .. a length of wire can change by 8-10%. After you turn the current off it cools and you need a force to stretch it back to its original state. I came up with this bow idea. The acrylic acts as a spring and its also quite large. I was interested in the [sherborne house] mural with its hunting theme.. there are a lot of bows and arrows.

All the experimentations and lots of trial and error.. has lead us to this piece. The idea was to create a reflective globe and to hang it up [near the mural] and have a more direct relationship with the mural. People would be able to see it in the stairway, to walk around it and look down into it and up into it.. but there were too many problems so we brought it into the study here. I'm projecting slides of the mural onto the reflective surface, instead. So rather than seeing the mural IN it, the mural is reflected OFF it. The other slide here relates it back to the globe idea. I've previously done a lot of drawings using gravity-induced pendulums so in essence the mass of the earth would be producing the drawings and as an artist I would be responsible for making the instrumentation needed to harness that force or energy. So, we have here a drawing that I made onto a sheet of carbon glass - relating it back to the universal idea - the globe!!

You will have spotted the movement of the bows - there is a wave that starts on the opposing sides and travels round the globe. Tidal movements maybe.. but it is also changing the reflections and the nature of the space.

Q: So presumably its doing this on both sides at the same time..

BB: Yes. When people enter the space it starts moving in response.. there is a lot of electronics above it to make it move. My mentor, Sam Lanyon, helped me design the electronics. I hope to carry on using nitinol. There is lots more to explore now having had the experience of working with this material - as far as I know there is nobody else working with nitinol on this scale.

Q: There is not an OBVIOUS link between this and the colour theme of the project.

BB: Well, like all reflective surfaces it occupies the characteristics of the space it is in... initially at the Symposium we were introduced to quite a few different [materials]. and one of the speakers - Peter Goodhew - half the things he was talking about was very physics based . about nano structures. Essentially what is happening here is that the structure of this wire is changing.. so that movement of the atom is translated into something almost universal. so you are harnessing that ... the atoms are rejigging themselves into a different orientation and something at that nano scale is happening and you are magnifying that movement to produce something visual.

 

Colour + Chemistry Homepage

Back to homepage