Sheshnag's Coloured Canopy: The Rainbow and The Kaleidoscope as Metaphor and Method

Abstract

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.”