This month on A Geography of Colour podcast I am talking with painter Sarah Needham about her relationship with colour.

Sarah lives and works in North London. Her painting is concerned with the way in which pigments leave material colour across human history, geography and traces of our interactions. Often something happening now prompts her research into a historical event or place and her paintings develop from this. Sarah makes oil paints by hand from pigments and often sources these in the landscape relevant to a particular project. Her work is abstract and she describes her paintings as ‘spaces to fall into’.

There is a sense in which these colours hold nuance and space for connection as well as symbolism. She has visited the 20,000 year old cave paintings in Pech Merle, learnt about the material traceability of ochres and has researched the British Library archive to find out about the historical spread of cobalt based glazes through archaeological finds. She has also researched the pigments imported into St Katharine docks at the time of the abolitionist movement, and found indigo, a slave trade product, a colour of both exploitation and beauty. She is currently working on a project collecting pigments and materials related to places impacted by the witch panics of the 1600s.

Thanks to Arts Council England for supporting this project with a Develop Your Creative Practice Grant..

LINKS:

https://www.sarahneedhamartist.co.uk

Pigment Compendium by Nicholas Eastaugh, Valentine Walsh, Tracey Chaplin, Ruth Siddall, Routledge, 2008 https://www.routledge.com/Pigment-Compendium/Eastaugh-Walsh-Chaplin-Siddall/p/book/9780750689809

Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans by Jenny Balfour Paul, British Museum Publications, 2011 https://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/trade/indigo.html

https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk

@ageographyofcolour

https://www.contemporarybritishpainting.com

@paintbritain

@aceagrams