Colour and Poetry 2022
Colour & Poetry: A Symposium IV is a cross and interdisciplinary three-day online event held by the Slade in celebration of International Colour Day, World Poetry Day and World Pigment Day.
The symposium hosts a range of speakers representing the arts and humanities, science and industry, drawing upon knowledge from within and outside of the Õ¬ÄÐÊÓƵ community, it includes presentations, readings, performance and practical workshops.
Workshops include: Poetry Workshop with Professor Sharon Morris, Pochoir print technique with James Keith, Colour Mixing with Ian Rowlands and Mediums and Surfaces with Gabriela Girolleti.
Bookings
The symposium will be held online via Zoom.
Reservations via Eventbrite.
Programme
All times are approximate and GMT.
The advertised programme may be subject to change.
Questions will be taken through the chat if time permitting.
Colour/Pigment/Poetry is an online exhibition curated by Stephanie Nebbia that accompanies the symposium.
Symposium Director
Jo Volley
C&P slideshow
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Palette #2, Jo Volley, 2019
©the artist
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Yellow is a beautiful colour, no?, Jo Volley, 2020
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Cyanometer #2, Jo Volley, 2021
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St. George’s Verdigris, Lucy Mayes, 2021, verdigris pigment and cherry gum on archival watercolour board
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Old Light, Robert Rivers
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Dust to Dust, Estelle Thompson, 2020 - 21
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Green Flash, Estelle Thompson, 2021
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Photomicrograph of crushed azurite used as pigment at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, Ruth Siddall, photograph
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If Only You Could See, Fabian Peake, 2020, watercolour
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Roses, Vincent van Gogh, 1890, oil on canvas
Public domain, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436534
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The Art of Attention: The Court of Gayumars, Vaishali Prazmari, 2021 - 22, opaque watercolour on paper
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Winton Nos.1-45 poster
Winsor & Newton Archives
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Ullyesand Pigment
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Nosferatu, 1920, film still
Sunday 20 March
Sunday 20 March 2022
10.00 Introduction and welcome Jo Volley
10.05  Josef Albers: Colour Conversations
Malina Busch combines painted, sculpted and knotted elements to explore spaces where feeling and looking overlap. She studied at Slade School of Fine Art, MFA; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA; and College of William and Mary, BA. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, US; Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK; Jerwood Space, London, UK; Collyer Bristow Gallery, London, UK; and Hush Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey. She lives and works in London.
10.30 Primary Triad
Ian Rowlands artist & TFAC demonstrator. This workshop explores the crucial attributes of colour; hue, value and saturation and argues the case for the restricted palette as a highly empowering experience. The primary triad is capable of creating harmony and diversity
11.00 Poetry Reading
Benjamin Arthur Brown is an artist, poet and curator at Van Gogh House London. Website:  
11.15 Romantic Materials - Exploring stinging nettles, old paper and the greenwood of E M Forster's novel Maurice.
Robert Rivers is an artist and the current Honorary Research Associate working with the Material Research Project at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Related links: ,
11.45 MORE POUR
An exploration of pouring mediums and colour mixing with Gabriela Giroletti, artist & TFAC demonstrator.  Gabriela is a painter based in London, whose work explores the possibilities of painting in practical and metaphorical terms. Experimentation is key to her practice. Website:
12.15 Poems after art
During the workshop we will look at ekphrastic poems and try out strategies for writing. Professor Sharon Morris, artist & poet, Slade Deputy Director (Academic)
Lunch break
14.00   Ask the Chemist
Mark Cann, Colart Technical Excellence Manager, will deliver a Q&A session on material related questions. Over the past 40 + years Mark has worked in various surface coatings industries and almost half of his career, 21 years has been spent at Colart, as an Innovation and Development chemist and more recently heads up the TCE department as Technical Excellence Manager, Colart.
14.30 Pochoir Print Technique
James Keith, artist and printmaker at the Slade, will lead a workshop exploring the pochoir print technique using a range of Winsor & Newton designer gouache and acrylic paints. Pochoir is a method of making a limited edition of coloured stencil prints, also called hand colouring, which was very popular in the 19th century and taught at the Slade from 1939 for a number of years
15.00 Colour in the Mind
Exploring colour in the mind with visual illusions and the RGB East website.
Jo Guile, artist.
15.30 Poetry Reading
Mataio Austin Dean (b. 1996) grew up in Portsmouth with a Guyanese mother and an English father. He uses intaglio printmaking to create images and symbols which explore England and Guyana's darkly intertwined histories; throwing light upon moments of resistance as well as unearthing stories of both coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Austin Dean’s practice is research-driven, exploring Marxism as a framework for emancipatory praxis. English and Guyanese oral cultures are at the heart of Austin Dean's work. Reimagining, writing, and performing folksong and poetry breathes life into the printed landscape, making the past tangible whilst presenting liberatory modes with which to confront the present.
15.45 A Hidden Trace of Cobalt
Robert Mead is a painter and PhD researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art. Moving through the strata of his paintings digs up histories and ghosts of our past which linger in the changing landscapes of today. Using the materiality of paint and process of harvesting and making pigments, his research reveals different types of residue of human impacts on our planet. Instagram: Website: /slade/research/mphil-phd/robert-mead
16.00 Just another year
Niki Kohandel is an artist and filmmaker in her third year of undergraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Niki films mothers and daughters, houses and flowers, and all sorts of things which, like relationships, can be nurtured, but also grow out of control. She uses obsolete recording devices and her imperfect knowledge of languages to document and tell stories, creating at the interplay between the analogue and the digital. Her films have been shown with Habibi Collective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, T A P E Collective at Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, and at the ICA as part of London Short Film Festival in 2022.
16.15 Colour/Pigment/Poetry
Stephanie Nebbia, artist and curator of Colour/Pigment/Poetry, in conversation with Jo Volley
16.30 An Oscillating Rhythm of Yellow Semi-Circles and Blue Perforated Circles – and other ways that colour territorialises even if its divisions are, like those of language, arbitrary in the first instance.
Kreider + O’Leary are a poet and an architect who collaborate to make work in relation to sites of architectural and cultural interest. Combining aspects of performance, installation, documentary, poetry, fiction and image-making, the work of Kreider + O’Leary exposes and interweaves the complexities of place into a fabrication of the real. Since 2003, they have made work in places such as prisons, military sites, film locations, landscape gardens, desert environments and more traditional gallery venues across the UK, USA, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan.
They have published two books, Falling (Copy Press, 2015) and Field Poetics (Ma Bibliothèque (2018) and they are currently working on a large-scale project, Ungovernable Spaces, engaging with five sites of community and resistance globally.
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Drawing in Colour
17.30 – 19.30 Drawing in Colour: Drawing with Chalk Pastels & The Colour Wheel
Figure drawing class Andy Pankhurst, artist and Slade alumnus.
Separate booking required 45 places available.
Monday 21 March
10.00 International Colour Day & World Poetry Jo Volley
10.05 Keynote: Colours we cannot see: A talk inspired from a conversation with Dr Ruth Siddall
Daren Caruana is the Scientist in Residence at the Slade School of Fine Art for 2021 ²¹²Ô»å  Professor of Physical Chemistry at UCL Chemistry. My research is mainly focused on interaction of electric charge and chemistry in various forms. In particular, I investigate the properties of flames and other plasmas due to their interesting electrical conductivity. I have broad interests, ranging from analytical chemistry and biochemistry to pigments and oil painting.
10.30 Poetry Reading
George Szirtes is a poet and translator. Author of some 30 books, he has won various prizes for his work in both fields, including The T S Eliot Prize for Poetry and the International Booker Prize for translation, and in 2021 he won the James Tait Black Prize for biography with ‘The Photographer at Sixteen’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
11.00 : The Art of Attention: Recreating The Court of Gayumars, a historical Persian Miniature Painting
In this presentation Vaishali Prazmari will give an informal tour of the painting as she paints it, talking about whatever falls under her brush at that moment. Each time she gives this 'tour' it is different.
Vaishali incorporates Persian, Indian and Chinese elements into her work. This cultural richness has a historical tradition dating back to the Silk Road and is epitomized in Islamic, Safavid Persian and Mughal Indian miniature paintings. She integrates both the ancient and modern in her own works and brings traditional miniature painting to life for a wider audience through her various roles as artist, educator and curator.
Websites:
11.30 Shimmering
An informal conversation between Jagjit Chuhan ²¹²Ô»å Sharon Morris. Jai Chuhan creates expressionistic paintings showing the human form in room-like spaces, exploring the female gaze, inspired by her position as an Indian-born British artist. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and her work has included being a Professor at Liverpool John Moores University. Her paintings have been in solo and group exhibitions internationally including in Sweden, Italy, China, and in the UK at venues including Tate Liverpool;  Barbican, London; Pitshanger Gallery, London; Liverpool Biennial and HOME for Asia Triennial Manchester. Her paintings and drawings are in collections including Cartwright Hall, Bradford; Arts Council Collection and Tate.
Sharon Morris, artist & poet, Professor and Slade Deputy Director (Academic) and until recently head of the Slade PhD programme.
11.45 How the past can inform the present: Through the use of the notebooks of 19th century chemist George Field, in particular Chromatography; or, a Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of their Powers in Painting  (published by Winsor & Newton), Stephanie Nebbia discusses how looking at the past can inspire new colours.
Stephanie Nebbia is an artist,  curator and TFAC Global Manager,  Colart. She studied fine art BA and MA at the UAL. Residencies in Turin, Berlin and Newcastle. Exhibitions include: Rope Walk open, Lincoln. Straight from the studio, CC gallery London. National Print openLondon, winner Badger Press award. TAG, Group show, Tobacco Art Gallery, London. ‘Exposition Provisoire’Schloss Katzenzungen, Sud Tyrol, Italy. Residence Delloye, Valenciennes, France. Maison de L’art et de la Communication, Sallaumines, France. Artsenal, Issy Les Moulineaux, France. ‘Titre Venir’ Acte De Naissance La Rotonde a Bethune, France. Cubitt St Gallery, London. La Maison de la Culture de Tournai, Belgium. L’institut Francais de Barcelone, Spain. ‘Diptik’ St Andre, Lille. Mauberge museum, Cultural centre Bruay le Buissiere, Museum of Niort, France. ‘Project Nebenstrecke’, Berlin, Germany.
12.05 Poetry Reading
Korallia Stergides (b.1993, Cyprus) is an interdisciplinary artist. She uses autobiographical narrative and ecological fact to create new myths and explores the embodiment of a place between reality and fiction. Her improvisations are collated into an archive; content is used to progress research and recycled as memory in eventual works. Korallia’s work explores the vital politics of care in an interdependent world and emphasizes nonhuman agencies. Her choreographic enquiries are framed through an interweaving of poetry, performance, installation, printmaking, photography film and sound; inviting the audience into her research and experiments - reimagining the intimacy of our interspecies relationships and home.
12.15 Palettes – the London adventures of Rimbaud and Verlaine
Andy Leak Emeritus Professor, UCL French Dept
12.30 Gardens of Desire
Latifah A. Stranack is a Slade graduate who paints the women that she encounters into bold goddesses, symbolising and celebrating the child, maiden, mother and wise old woman. She creates her heroines to explore her own memories, mythology, and issues in the modern world.
Lunch break
14.00  Recovering the art of hand-painting magic lantern glass slides
Dr Vanessa Otero  is a Researcher at the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the NOVA School of Science and Technology, Lisbon (Portugal). She holds a PhD in Conservation Science and her research is focused on the study of artists’ materials, including their historical production, colour stability and the analytical methods used to identify them in heritage objects. For the last 10 years, she has been investigating the Winsor & Newton 19th Century Archive Database to advance knowledge on the conservation of our cultural heritage.
14.30 Colour in Buildings for People Living with Dementia
Helena Howard (she/her) is a practising architect at Hawkins\Brown in London and has conducted project-based research into the application of colour in the built environment, with a specific focus on the use of colour in the Healthcare sector, both to improve visual accessibility but also to infuse space with joy and delight. She has worked as part of the project team delivering the new UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and UK Dementia Research Headquarters.
15.00 Word as Art: Beauty in the Margins
A presentation by Sarah Pipkin about UCL Special Collection's exhibition exploring the permeable borders between art and writing.
Sarah Pipkin (she/her) is the Outreach and Exhibitions Coordinator for UCL Special Collections and curator of Special Collection’s exhibition ‘Word as Art: Beauty in the Margins.’ She has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and over ten years’ experience working in academic and special collections libraries.
15.30  Paintings Fade like Flowers
Kimberly Selvaggi is currently Conservator in Residence at the Slade School of Fine Art. She was originally trained in the fine arts before attending the conservation program at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where she has been pursuing a career in the practice of heritage and arts conservation with a special interest in dyes, paints, and pigments and their use in material culture.
16.00 Blue. I mean green. Blue, green
Egidija ÄŒiricaitė is a PhD candidate at the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), working on an interdisciplinary research with UCL Linguistics. She is an artist and poet, with a special interest in artist publishing. Her research and practice explore metaphor and its effects at the intersection of language and the visual. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, amongst these the V&A in London, the Bibliotheque Kandinsky-Centre Pompidou, Paris, ²¹²Ô»å Museum Meermanno in Amsterdam.
16.30 Finding & Found Colour: The Materiality of Abstraction, Living in the Caribbean
Estelle Thompson, is a British abstract painter working with optics, colour and material presence, also commissioned to incorporate colour in the built environment of public buildings such as the Milton Keynes Theatre and most recently the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford in 2020. She has exhibited and curated internationally and in 2019 established , Barbados, a space to showcase and support artists from the Caribbean and diaspora. She is an Associate Professor and was Head of Graduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art from 2018-21.
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Tuesday 22 March
10.00 World Pigment Day’s 2nd Anniversary - Jo Volley & Ruth Siddall
10.05. Winsor and Newton: The Integrity of Colour
Cris Cosgrave is a chemist by profession and the Sustainable Innovation Programme Manager, Colart. Sebastian Bucholski, Fine Art Brand Manager at Winsor & Newton
10.30 Unusual Colour in Unusual Minerals: A talk inspired from a conversation with Professor Daren Caruana
Ruth Siddall is a geologist, who applies analytical techniques from the field of Earth sciences to further the understanding of cultural material, primarily pigments, construction and decorative stone, ceramics and plasters. Slade Scientist in Residence 2018-19 and co-founder of World Pigment Day
11.00 Fragments from SEDOPITNA
Fabian Peake is a painter and writer based in London. His work is concerned with the conflict between the flatness of the wall and the space immediately in front of the wall. Painting is an extremely broad phenomenon. The mist becomes the mountain. His writing locates itself in a poetic equivalence to painting. His poems employ thought processes that are linked more to painting than to literature. Poems are paintings; paintings are poems.
11.30 GRIT: An introduction to waste stream pigments made by Lucy Mayes of London Pigment
Lucy Mayes an artist-pigment maker for a workshop in using local/at hand materials to make paint & ink.
12.00  Red box files and other accumulations: The Slade archive and an artist’s archival finding aid
This presentation tells the story of an idiosyncratic finding aid designed to help researchers navigate the archive of the Slade School of Fine Art. It takes into account the story of its origins as well its material, aesthetic and affective qualities, and those of the archive it attempts to represent.
is a researcher, archive curator and oral historian, and Senior Lecturer in Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies, UCL. Her research is concerned with the records and recordkeeping practices of artists and visual arts organisations, as well as the interconnections between archives and curation.
12.30 Colour: Perceived, Remembered and Imagined
Dr Edward Winters is an artist and writer. He is an elected member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art; and an elected member of the council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He writes widely on art and aesthetics
Lunch break
14.00 Earth Fog, on being lost in paint
Sean Borodale has published 5 volumes of poetry: Notes for An Atlas, 2003; Bee Journal, 2012 was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Human Work, 2015, Inmates, 2020; Asylum, 2018. His work has been widely anthologised including Ground Work: Writings on Places and People ed. by Tim Dee.
14.30 Jamaican indigo - Reconnection & Healing
Lucille Junkere is a research-based visual artist, engaging several themes, including the impact of British colonialism in African Caribbean textile histories. The dispossession caused by the transatlantic slave trade means that ancestral and cultural connections have been severed. Through her work Lucille explores identity and a past connected to chattel slavery. She uses the materiality of cloth, visual symbolism, botanical and ochre pigments to explore loss, grief, healing, resistance and reconnection. Her presentation focuses on her recent Leverhulme Fellowship, through which she documented Jamaica’s former indigo plantations. Website:Â
15.00 Ask the Conservator Q&A
Kimberly Selvaggi is currently Conservator in Residence at the Slade School of Fine Art. She originally trained in the fine arts before attending the conservation program at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where she has been pursuing a career in the practice of heritage and arts conservation with a special interest in dyes, paints, and pigments and their use in material culture.
15.30 Perfect Blue: an introduction to early cinema's tinting processes
Before the advent of colour filmmaking, early cinema developed a variety of additive colour processes as a way of amplifying spectacle. This talk is a primer on the use, associations and technical elements of tinting, told through the colour closely associated with night-time scenes: blue. It is also an invitation to consider a return to tinting B&W film stocks with sustainability in mind.
Andrew Northrop is the Slade's Interim Film & Media Technician. He also works as a journalist covering films and interviewing filmmakers, with a focus on archival film, restoration projects, artist moving image and non-fiction. His writing has appeared in publications such as BOMB Magazine, Senses of Cinema, MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies, Millenium Film Journal and more.
16.00 Rewriting objects: Volley’s Ulleysand & Sully’s Joss
Dr Dean Sully is Associate Professor in Conservation at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, where he coordinates the MSc in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums. He is a coordinator of the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) and the Curating the City Research Cluster, National Trust’s Conservation Advisor for Archaeological Artefacts, and Emeritus Scientist in Residence at the Slade School of Fine Art where he is Conservator in Residence to the Material Museum. He studied conservation and gained his PhD at UCL, and has worked as a conservation practitioner for the National Heritage Board in Singapore, The Museum of London, The British Museum, and Monmouthshire District Council Museums Service.
16.30 Gesturalities in Colour and Words
Professor Yannis Ziogas, artist & Dean of School of Fine Arts, University of Western Macedonia
Close - end of 2022 symposium
Colour & Poetry supporters
This event is generously supported by Colart
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