The way we encounter the history of art is changing. Increasingly, aspects of artworks that were once primarily the domain of conservation and technical art history are reaching wider audiences through popular books, social media, and other public-facing formats.
One of these aspects is artists' pigments. Pigments lend themselves well to storytelling - they carry strong visual identities, and can be woven into other narratives around chemical transformation, value, and extraction: colours that fade, pigments that were once more expensive than gold, materials that were sourced from distant regions.
This talk draws on my work across short-form video, social media, and writing for general audiences, to examine how pigment histories are shaped for a general audience. I will look at how technical knowledge about pigments, how they are made, how they behave, how they change, is structured into narrative. These stories make complex material processes legible and compelling, but they also select and foreground particular aspects of those materials.
How does isolating colour as a subject reshape the way paintings are encountered? What happens when attention shifts from subject or iconography to material composition? And how do these stories circulate and settle into familiar ways of explaining art?
One of these aspects is artists' pigments. Pigments lend themselves well to storytelling - they carry strong visual identities, and can be woven into other narratives around chemical transformation, value, and extraction: colours that fade, pigments that were once more expensive than gold, materials that were sourced from distant regions.
This talk draws on my work across short-form video, social media, and writing for general audiences, to examine how pigment histories are shaped for a general audience. I will look at how technical knowledge about pigments, how they are made, how they behave, how they change, is structured into narrative. These stories make complex material processes legible and compelling, but they also select and foreground particular aspects of those materials.
How does isolating colour as a subject reshape the way paintings are encountered? What happens when attention shifts from subject or iconography to material composition? And how do these stories circulate and settle into familiar ways of explaining art?
