Sheshnag's coloured canopy: the rainbow and the kaleidoscope as metaphor and method

• Main Author: Laird, Tessa
• Other Authors: Smith, Allan
• Published: ResearchSpace@Auckland 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2292/19428

If the reader wishes to understand the impetus for my project, it is necessary to start with that head with the loudest hiss: the polemic, which I have called ���Against Chromophobia.��� I argue that Chromophobia is a sign, a cypher, for a much bigger problem, contiguous with the destructive forces of monoculture, while the unbridled use of colour via the practices of psychedelia has liberatory potential, and I outline some of these in ���Colour as Carnival.��� In order to write and make around these ideas, and in order to sharpen my experience of colour, I utilised a methodology in which I studied one colour of the spectrum at a time, in sequence, which I discuss under the heading ���The Rainbow Serpent.��� In effect, I was using the given spectral sequence of the rainbow as a programmatic structure for addressing colour. Once each colour had been responded to in text, print and clay, a process that took a total of two years, I entered the final year of my Doctorate in which colours were fragmented, mixed, and latent patterns were encouraged and exaggerated: see ���The Kaleidoscope.���