Liz West presents Our Colour Reflection at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre

Liz West 
Our Colour Reflection
14 May - 25 June 2016

20-21 Visual Arts Centre is delighted to present Our Colour Reflection, an ambitious new work by artist Liz West. The installation will transform the interior of the former St John’s Church building housing the gallery by using over 700 mirrors to reflect the gallery lighting into the roofspace, projecting colour up into the historic interior. Viewers will see themselves in the mirrored surfaces as they explore the space - creating a dialogue between viewer, artwork and architecture. 

Liz West creates installations that use light and colour to transform spaces, and people’s experience of them. She aims to provoke a heightened sensory awareness in the viewer, tapping into our deeply entrenched relationship with colour, and exploring how it can move viewers, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.

Based in Manchester, Liz West studied at The Glasgow School of Art. Previous large-scale works have included Your Colour Perception, which had visitors returning to Manchester’s Federation House time and time again to witness the space saturated in colour, and her acclaimed installation An Additive Mix at the National Media Museum. Recent months have seen her shortlisted for the prestigious Aesthetica Art Prize, receiving a Bursary Award from the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and complete a major public-realm commission in the Spinningfields district of Manchester.

Our Colour Reflection has been made possible by funding from The National Lottery through Arts Council England. 

Friday 13 May 2016 
Launch Event 7pm to 10pm  
Coinciding with the national Museums at Night event, Liz West and 20-21 Visual Arts Centre invite you to the launch of Our Colour Reflection. The event includes activities suitable for all ages, and include interventions by video and installation artist Gillian Hobson from 8.30pm. 

Saturday 25 May 2016 
Drop-in Family Workshop with Liz West 10am to 4pm
 Join artist Liz West to create a new temporary artwork in the gallery education room. Suitable for all ages. Children remain the responsibility parents/ carers at all times. 10am to 4pm, free, drop-in.

20-21 Visual Arts Centre 
Church Square
Scunthorpe
North Lincolnshire
DN15 6TB 

Open Tuesday to Saturday
10am to 4pm
Free Entry 
Tel: 01724 297070 

About 20-21 Visual Arts Centre 20-21
 Visual Arts Centre is a North Lincolnshire Council cultural services venue and is supported by funding from Arts Council England as part of their National Portfolio of venue. Set in the neo-gothic former St John’s Church building just outside Scunthorpe town centre, the building hosts a busy café and shop and hosts a varied programme of contemporary art, design and craft exhibitions. Since opening in 2001 the gallery has received over 500,000 visitors. The building has recently undergone a £600,000 refurbishment.

Day 6 - Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn Residency

After finishing my book yesterday, I was left with lots of different ideas for how to start testing and playing. I wanted to carry on with the mini-projects I had begun to set myself (I like good project), they were proving both useful and practical. 

I was beginning to find my voice again, after initially going on this residency with the aim to strengthen my ideas and challenge concepts within my practice, I was gradually learning bit by bit more about myself. Re-discovering why it is that I am so immensely fascinated with colour and light combined. 

Luminosity was the word that encapsulated both interests in a way that made sense to me. The notion of luminous colour seeping, spilling, bleeding and staining the surfaces around us has been present in my practice for years, now I had a word for it. 

In the essay 'The Luminous and the Grey' Batchlor writes;

Luminous colours, however old they are, appear to have a particular relationship with the world around them and with their beholders that is unlike that of other colours. First, these are colours that escape their containers and bleed into the street; they deliver what colour always promises bus doesn't always achieve: a release from the surfaces and materials that support it, a release that leads to the fleeting magic of the 'fiery pool reflecting in the asphalt'. p.49

My has always been my challenge and interest to capture this notion within my practice. This concern, I feel, now has to be researched, pulled apart and made into being work, as my understanding of the medium deepens.

Reading whilst on this residency has been initially challenging for me, but has given my so much back in return. When I return home, I shall keep it up, keep learning and keep feeding this knowledge back into the work I develop.

Today I started to think about luminous colour within nature (as it was on my doorstep). Making a series of 'colour slides' which became little jewels when held up to a light source. I was thinking small-scale in order to trial the idea, the photographs below demonstrate how flat surface colour become luminescent.

Remember what I wrote on Day 3? - "What interests me about colour in the natural/rural landscape is the vividness created when the intensity of the sun shines onto/though it. More on that later…" In this experiment I was testing this thought out, instead of using the sunshine (of which there was very little on this cold autumnal day) I used a bulb.

Day 5 - Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn Residency

As my residency continued into day 5 at the famous Merz Barn, I became increasing aware that I had slowed my pace of life down. Reading had pretty much taken over as my daily task, then amusing myself by making relatively quick responses to the chapters in the form of mini-projects.

So far these mini-projects were helping me understand the meaning and concept of each chapter, allowing for a deeper knowledge of colour concerns, perceptions and discussion.

Today I had reached the last chapter. It was all about grey. I am not fond of grey, admittedly. The rest of of book had highlighted the use of luminous colour around us; in the media, in our cities, in our general everyday lives and why is is so brilliant and optimistic. I was not looking forward to the chapter on grey. I thought to myself - "no one is ever going to manage to convince me that grey is a worthy colour, is it even a colour? - more like a tone..."

I read on regardless, trusting the voice of the author wholeheartedly. His writing so far had been accurate, believable and educating.

David Batchelor's first line of the chapter is; "Grey is the colour of dying" - great! The last sentence of the chapter finishes describing the closing sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev (1966), it reads:

"The last, silent shot returns to the living world and to a panorama of grey, but a quieter, more humane and perhaps more luminous grey."

LUMINOUS F*****G GREY! The longest and most convincing chapter by far, but all that was written in between these two quotes was the most useful of all. I have been looking at grey as the neutral, bland, pessimistic, nothing colour for years.

I went outside of the gallery and pondered, looked around me; I noticed blues, reds, greens, oranges and all different colours within the greys around me. I realise that this is not a breakthrough for mankind, but I had been so dismissive about grey that I had not looked past the end of my own nose (and I have a sizable nose!) and so this was a small revelation for me personally.

"It is close to impossible in practice to find a grey that is not inflected by some other colour, although the not-grey of grey often only becomes visible as two or more different greys are placed next to each other. It is as if when a patch of grey is first seen it is more assumed than observed." p.78

Having completed this chapter and finished the book, I went off in the beautiful landscape and woodland of the Cylinders Estate where the Merz Barn is located with my camera and came back with the following set of images - as confirmation that blue -grey, red-grey, green-grey, really do exist and are BEAUTIFUL! 

The last image is more of a luminous grey than all the others - the sky!

Now I had finished my book and nearly finished my residency - what was I going to do?

 

Day 4 - Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn Residency

Today's mini-project revolved around the notion of how we remember surface colours and how our eyes respond to light.

Batchelor writes about the way in which we see colours as the property of the object. Even in different lighting conditions; our colour memory tells us what colour we think am object is. We make assumptions about the colour of an object based on what we have previously experienced, even when we see the same object under different lighting e.g. in a darkened room.

Colour constancy: "The facility that enables us to piece together wildly divergent perceptual experience of colours - a coloured object in sunlight, at dusk, in shade, at a distance, in varieties of artificial light, against other colours and so on" Batchelor suggests.

"Seeing the same objects under... different illuminations, we learn to get a correct idea of the object colours in spite of different illumination. We learn to judge how such an object would look in white light, and since our interest lies entirely in the object colour, we become unconscious of the sensations on which the judgement rests." - Hermann von Helmholtz (physicist and theorist of visual perception)

I wanted to test this theory.

I gathered a few objects from the Cylinders Estate, all of which depicted colouration of the chemical variety; colour only available within industrial manufacture (plastic, paint, etc). The hue in these objects is unchanging, until decay and weathering takes hold. They are entirely monochrome.

I photographed them under different lighting conditions: outdoor natural light; against a natural background, under artificial light; fluorescent and halogen. Below are the resulting images.

Although my experiment was fairly crude, it points out exactly what the text is talking about.

I am trying to think about exactly which colour I remember these objects to be; out of the possible three differences I saw. I 'think' of it to be the most vivid. To someone else, however, this could be different.

Interesting much....

Day 3 - Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn Residency

Firstly focusing on the preface of Batchelors The Luminous and the Grey I found the initializing of the argument to be about how and why colour exists in the world around us.

"It is not the presence of colour in a work that matters but the use of that colour; it isn't whether the colour is there that is at stake but what that colour does" - p.17

This got me thinking about where colour resides in the natural environment and asking myself: does it interest me?

What interests me about colour in the natural/rural landscape is the vividness created when the intensity of the sun shines onto/though it. More on that later...

For today, though I thought I would focus on surface colour, as that is highlighted in the preface. Instinctively it is the colours of chemical manufacture that interest me most; those vivid in hue and with strong saturation. Whilst residing in a rural landscape I wondered what the juxtaposition between natural colour and artificial colour would look like.

I also wanted to make a start by playing and involving my hands (baring in mind it was now Wednesday and the week seemed to be flying by) . I systematically wrapped from top to bottom green cotton thread around a dying plant. At first I just wrapped one, but then decided that in order to make an impact and become noticeable I would do several; this took me all day. 

  

By the end of the day I was satisfied with what I had done, but also felt that I wanted to learn more and so read on.

Today's work was futile in its longevity but useful in its concept. It did what I wanted and thought it might do, It got me going. However small, however insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it was a beginning, and everything has to start somewhere.