Colours Indicted

Exhibited in Praxis and Project spaces - Lasalle College of the Arts
and at Japan Creative Centre, Singapore 
2008 - 2010

Colours Indicted began as an enquiry into colour, framing and systems of classification. The project considers how colours are ordered, categorised and assigned meanings, and asks what might happen when these familiar structures are dismantled and reorganised.

 

The idea of the frame operates in two ways. As a physical structure, it contains and organises information, shaping how something is encountered and understood.

 

The miniature origami book becomes one such frame: a small structure that holds fragments of information relating to individual colours and the elements from which they are derived. At the same time, framing operates metaphorically. Colours are themselves continually framed by histories, associations and symbolic meanings that become difficult to separate from the colours themselves.

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Working with text, alchemical histories, paper folding and the structure of the periodic table, Colours Indicted became an attempt to unsettle these associations and propose alternative ways of ordering and reading colour.

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An early iteration took the form of E le men tal In ter ludes, a series of poems responding to the chemical elements of the periodic table. Each poem followed a four-line, eight-syllable structure and was distributed across miniature eight-page origami books. The placement of individual syllables across the pages deliberately interrupted the continuity of reading, introducing gaps between language, meaning and comprehension.

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These experiments subsequently developed through Colour Chart, in which texts relating to individual elements were fragmented and recombined according to the elemental composition of pigments. Colour therefore became a point of intersection between material composition, language, history and association.

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The research initiated through Colours Indicted would later expand into The Alchemical Interludes (2026), where these investigations into colour, elements, poetry and classification developed into a larger body of work encompassing 118 elemental poems, installation, publication, artistic collaborations, sound, moving image and live performance.