Colour

Perception of colour, light and shadow is very important in my work, noticing subtle differences in these is the key to the viewer interacting with it. In past projects I have looked at the work of Olafur Eliasson for ideas on light play and how we see colours, I find is work very physics based (waves! not that light is strictly a wave but wave properties are fascinating). He harnesses natural phenomena and presents it inside a gallery, The Weather Project involved a huge artificial Sun inside the Turbine Hall at the Tate Gallery. In videos of this work you can people lying on the floor of the gallery basking in the glow of a ginormous artificial 'sun'. They could see themselves whilst lying down in a giant mirror that covered the ceiling. It looked like a very relaxed situation for an art gallery, people seem to be at ease and feel at home. I guess in some ways you feel like your reactions to artwork are being judged by other viewers when you visit an exhibition. Interactivity quashes this feeling and people seem to lose their inhibitions if more than one participant is invited to partake in the work. I think the scale of it, and the size of the room it is in helps with this, people are free to move and not in each other's way, they can all experience it.
A problem with my final work from last year is the space I displayed it in. A bigger room, with a larger surface to project on would have been a lot more sucessful. It would allow people to more more freely within the space, play with the scale of their shadows, and have in some ways a more private experience. Well, just experience it where they don't have to worry about getting in someone else's way and effecting their reading of the work or limiting what another person can see/do.


Eliasson's installations are often experimental, laboratory-like, aiming to provoke visitors to reflect upon their own processes of perception and the discrepancy between knowledge conveyed and knowledge produced by real experience. The subject of colour perception is of particular interest to Eliasson, in particular the mediation or experience of colour in space. At Ikon, Eliasson proposes to create a self-contained sculptural environment in which a colour matching laboratory is created exploring variations in human colour perception.

The below is an image from Eliasson's 2006 work 'Your Uncertainty Of Colour Matching Experiment'. People have to choose a colour on the computer screen that they think closely matches the tone of blue Eliasson has provided for them. the resulting circles are formed with the original coulour and the one chosen by the viewer/participant.
This is one of my favourite works of his just because it deals with physical and chemical properties of people that alter their perception; things that they cannot change. No social, issues or past experiences (except for eye injuries..) effect what they give to this work it is all sort of chosen for them already.