Outlining a new palette
Over the past few months, I have been focused on reading and writing about, and cooking – colours! The second case study in the PhD project The Settlers – Towards New Territories in Design, has been an examination of the dye colours represented by 72 invasive species in the project. I have been working on two parallel levels:
Practical / experimental: Collecting plant materials for testing. Cooking the various plant parts (roots, petals, this, bark, etc) with a material swatch and four different mordants. Sometimes the same plant material has been harvested and tested several times through the season, as hues and colours differ through the year.
Theoretical: Learning about different techniques of plant-dying, as well as the history and previous use, in order to compare to contemporary colour production.
This initial recording of the “New Wild Colour Palette” resulted in a paper and presentation at the XVII Color Conference in Florence, organized by Gruppo del Colore - Associazione Italiana Colore. It has been very exciting to be able to share and discuss the research with such an expert audience!
The paper, Plants out of place? A design-driven investigation of colour and material possibilities within a group of “invasive alien plant species” in a Norwegian context, can be found as a part of the publication Colour and Colorimetry. Multidisciplinary Contributions. Vol. XVII A (p.206). For more information and download: https://www.rcasb.eu/index.php/RCASB/catalog/book/7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.23738/RCASB.006
Photo credit: Siren Elise Wilhelmsen
