Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VII

Image: Colour and Poerty VII, Lesley Sharpe, 2025 ©Lesley Sharpe

Nomenclature of Colours V

This online show, curated by Stephanie Nebbia, will go live on Friday 21 March.

Speakers:

Ruth Siddall / Paul Smith / Vaishali Prazmari / Lavinia Harrington / Lujain Tamer-Mansour/ Jordan Verdes / Liz Rideal / Johny Meghames / Rob Kesseler / Jenny Ihn / Scott Brown / Liz Lawes / Sharon Morris/ Yannis Ziogas / Christine Kirubi / Fiona McLees / Roman Sheppard Dawson / Stella Kajombo / Liz Harrington / Jasmir Creed / Lesley Sharpe / Sara Choudhrey / Lucy Mayes / Brece Honeycutt / Tian Rossana Wong

Programme:

10:00: Introduction and welcome: Jo Volley, artist and symposium director.

Day hosted by Kimberly Selvaggi.

10:05: From Chronostratigraphy to Chromostratigraphy: The Use of Colour in Geological Maps.

Dr Ruth Siddall works on materiality in art and architecture through the scientific and social historical study of stone, pigments and ceramic materials. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council Advanced Grant STONE-WORK in the Department of History of Art & Architecture, Trinity College Dublin.

10:20: Cezanne, colour, and neurodiversity.

Paul Smith is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. His publications touch on Delacroix’s, Pissarro’s, Seurat’s, and Cezanne’s colour; Adrian Stokes's, Merleau-Ponty’s, and Wittgenstein’s ideas about colour; and the science of colour perception. He is co-editor with Judith Mottram of the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Color.

10:35: A Recreation of the Court of Gayumars.

Vaishali Prazmari’s work incorporates elements from various cultures including the Indo-Persian miniatures and Chinese painting of her heritage. Her practice-led PhD at the Slade focuses on the 1001 Arabian Nights.

10:45: Colour & Dreams.

Lavinia Harrington is an Italian-British artist. She received her Painting MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, 2024. Lavinia has worked in arts education for over a decade and graduated from Oxford University in History of Art (BA Hons.) 2008, completing her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art, 2010.

10:55: Stream of Rupture.

Lujain Tamer-Mansour is a multidisciplinary artist from East Jerusalem, currently completing her final year in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. Taking a pyscho-automatic drawing and building approach, her work centres the play between childhood recall and Levantine mysticism as an idle examination of wider Israeli-apartheidic conditions and their implications on the occupied psyche. The bleed of memory into the mundane is often explored through the scattering and fusing of grains into domesticated spaces, primarily in bedrooms and places of intended rest.

11:05: Repurposed to Pigment: Creating Paint from Excavation Byproduct.

Jordan Verdes is a London-based painter with a meticulous approach to painting materials and processes. His research into painting’s materiality has led to works being stripped down to their essential parts and viewing them as constituents. These elements are scrutinised with a particular focus on identifying what is used and where things come from. Fascinated by earth and metal pigments, Verdes collects and hand-processes samples from nature, refining them into usable pigments in his work. Themes explore the relationship between the handmade and manufactured, material traceability, and ethical concerns regarding sustainability and the origins of pigments.

11:15am: Non Sine Sole Iris No Rainbow without Sun

Liz Rideal, Professor at the Slade, has exhibited in Europe and the United States, with artwork in public collections including Tate; Victoria & Albert Museum; The National Portrait Gallery; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale Centre for British Art, LACMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Her publications include books on self-portraiture, portraiture and a best-seller: How to Read Painting.

11:30: Biobased acrylics.

Johny Meghames is a formulation chemist at Liquitex and will present on the development and future of biobased acrylic paints. With a keen focus on sustainability in art materials, Johny will explore the intersection of innovation and environmental responsibility in modern paint formulations building on the momentum of Liquitex's commitment to eco-friendly practices.

11:45: INFUSIONS: chromatic staining from the lab to the olive grove.

Rob Kesseler is Emeritus Professor of Art, Design and Science at Central Saint Martins and for the past twenty-five years has worked extensively with botanical scientists and molecular biologists around the world to explore the living world at a microscopic level. Taking inspiration from ‘Tarashikomi’, the Japanese art of painting ‘wet on wet’, INFUSIONS applies his research into the staining of plant samples, common practice in plant science, to an intuitive act of drawing living olive trees to suggest the life forces within.

12:00 noon: Colours of Korea before and after the Industrial Revolution.

Jenny Ihn is a painter of Korean heritage living in London. Her pigment works are simultaneously painting and drawing whereby notions of image and mark-making are in dynamic tension. She studied at the Sydney College of Arts (BVA, MFA) where she was the recipient of the Dominik Mersch Gallery Award. Currently she is a doctoral researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art, exploring the materiality of colour, in particular its provenance and its capacity to evince the (now somewhat lost) porosity of matter and spirit.

12:10: Reading.

Scott Brown

12:20: Sixty years of Colour and Poetry in the UCL Small Press Collections .

Liz Lawes is the UCL Subject Liaison Librarian for Fine Art, History of Art and Film Studies and the Collection Manager of the Small Press Collections in UCL Special Collections. The Small Press Collections are globally significant collections of 20th century independently published, experimental literary, counter-cultural, and visual art publications, held by UCL Special Collections. Liz facilitates the use of the collections in teaching and research across UCL. They are also open to the public, by appointment.
The display will feature examples of independent poetry publishing from the UCL Small Press Collections, including visual and concrete poetry, performance poetry scores, and poem object.

12:30: Poems after art.

Sharon Morris. During the workshop we will look at ekphrastic poems and try out strategies for writing. Sharon Morris is an artist & poet, and a professor of fine art at the Slade.

Lunch 1–2pm: Showreel of The Nomenclature of Colours III online exhibition that accompanies Colour & Poetry curated by Stephanie Nebbia.
 

14:00: Cartographies/Colour/Choreographies: the body shaping space

Yannis Ziogas is a painter who also explores various areas of visual expression. He is a Professor at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia. He is organizing the process Visual March to Prespa and other Walking Ιnternational Εncounters/Conferences and writes on art.

14:15: Partures.

Christine Kirubi is an artist-poet based in London. She is the author of WILDPLASSEN published in 2024 by the87press.

14:30: ‘Faded Panseys on the sands at night’: Gwen John & Colour.

Fiona McLees is Senior Paper Conservator at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, currently researching and conserving their collection of Gwen John’s watercolours and drawings, paying particular attention to the materials she used and the ways in which she memorised and calculated colour relationships. In 2026 the Museum will open a solo retrospective for the 150th anniversary of Gwen John’s birth, to be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue and new book focusing on her collections at Amgueddfa Cymru.

14:45: Virtual/Digital Colour

Roman Sheppard Dawson is an artist/filmmaker and Slade MFA Media graduate. His practice explores the nature of sight through the language of the camera. The work is often introspective, weaving his personal history and archive with the mechanics of image-recording and examining the camera lens’ frustum, the frame and the gaze. Informed by both structuralist materialist cinema and his upbringing around the theatre, he locates his practice within the notion of performativity, the influence of the gaze and the materials we use to create experience.

15:00: Reading. Stella Kajombo.

Stella Kajombo is a Malawi-born artist currently residing in London. She graduated from Arts University Bournemouth in 2019 after completing a BA in Fine Art. Her practice focuses on the complexities of diasporic identity and heritage through the production collages and various other material assemblages to capture ‘new’ memories and oral histories. She will be presenting a reading from a personal text reflecting the symbiotic relationship between colour and identity.

15:15 Darkroom Garden.

Liz Harrington is a visual artist, predominantly working with process led, experimental analogue and alternative photographic techniques. She is currently studying at the Slade School of Fine Art (MFA, Fine Art Media 2024-2026) and researching more sustainable photographic working methods in her practice, including the creation of plant-based developers and toners.

15:30: Urban Spectrum.

Jasmir Creed is a practice-led PhD researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Solo exhibitions of her work include Utopolis at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, Warrington 2023, Dystopolis at Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool 2018 with a catalogue distributed by Liverpool University Press 2018-2021. Group exhibitions include Auguries of Innocence at Cedric Bardawil Gallery, London 2025; Standing Ground at Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London 2024 and Indian Perspectives at Victoria Gallery & Museum, 2024-2025. Upcoming group exhibitions include Reflections at Without Shape Without Form (WSWF), Slough, 2025 touring to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 2026; Many Stories at Midlands Art Centre, 2027

15:45 Beinn Dubh (Black Mountain).

Lesley Sharpe is an artist printmaker living between Scotland and London. She is a Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art and when not teaching or making, can be found on her bike. Influenced by her industrial heritage, her practice explores the relationship between Print, Process and Place through the use of analogue and digital printmaking processes.

16:00: Ottoman brocades and the British Arts & Crafts movement.

Dr Sara Choudhrey is a London-based artist and researcher, exploring themes of visual culture, heritage and society. She references historical collections, archives and architecture with a specialism in Islamic art and design and its impact beyond the Islamic world. Sara holds a Masters in Digital Arts from UAL (2010) and a PhD in Digital Arts from University of Kent (2018).

16:15: Pigment Relations.

Lucy Mayes is an artist, educator, and founder of London Pigment, a studio dedicated to the research and creation of natural pigments. Based currently in Portsmouth, she explores the intersection of art, ecology, and material history, sourcing and processing earth and botanical pigments through ethical and sustainable methods. With a deep passion for traditional pigment-making techniques, Lucy teaches workshops and shares her knowledge on sourcing, extracting, and formulating natural colourants. Her work celebrates place-based materials, craftsmanship, and the revival of historical processes, inspiring artists to reconnect with the origins of their materials. In this talk, Lucy will use a series of diagrams to explore unexpected and esoteric connections between colourants, offering new perspectives that may change the way you think about them.

16:30 ‘collour scarlet on a stormy day’

Brece Honeycutt, multimedia artist and Shaker researcher, will read poetry from her upcoming book Prismatic Utopia which explores the Shakers use of colour through handmade paints and dyes. Her project anything but drab, located in a historic Shaker Office, will open at Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA) May 2025.

16:45 Sérénade.

Tian Rossana Wong is a BFA final year painting student from Hong Kong. She likes to use music, ancient art and architecture as sources of inspiration to create dialogues between cross-cultural concepts of humanity within Taoist Buddhism and Roman Catholicism. To achieve this, she is currently exploring ways to transpose her traditional Chinese Calligraphy mark-making skills and sense of touch in music performance into a self-inventive, contemporary approach to using a variety of mediums: from layering of ink, watercolour, gouache, acrylic, oil, egg tempera, fresco, photography, printmaking to sound, moving images, and performance on different surfaces and grounds.Rossana recently sung as a soloist with the UCL Symphony Chorus in the UCL Spring Concert 2025. She is looking forward to delivering a live singing performance of “Sérénade”, with the music written by Charles Gounod, lyrics by Victor Hugo. (The piece will be sung in French).
 

For more information: Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VII