The Dyes
2014
Inverleigh House, Edinburgh and Langen Foundation Dusseldorf
Inverleigh House, Edinburgh and Langen Foundation Dusseldorf
Follows a period of study at the Royal Botanic Garden’s Herbarium, during which time Sworn’s interest in the properties of plants used in natural dying developed alongside an interest into the manipulation of the chromatic register of photo-graphic images.
Sworn has borrowed the techniques of natural dying - with their catalytic interventions, idiosyncratic tendencies and unstable results - as a means of exploring the instability of objects as they shift and change through time and relative to their environment.
Sworn has borrowed the techniques of natural dying - with their catalytic interventions, idiosyncratic tendencies and unstable results - as a means of exploring the instability of objects as they shift and change through time and relative to their environment.
A number of plant specimens selected from the Herbarium’s collection of almost 3 million dried plants are also displayed as part of the exhibition, representing some of the species used by Sworn in the dying process.
The inherently unpredictable, yet malleable nature of these dyes enables Sworn to create colour works whose colour derives from chance encounters with different formulas, objects and materials. These experiments, with their imprecise methodologies, investigative approach and association with the pre-industrial contain echoes of the proto-scientific aspects of alchemy. Through a variety of interventions, everyday items such as the skin of an onion or the leaves of a cabbage become the subject of myriad transformations.
The inherently unpredictable, yet malleable nature of these dyes enables Sworn to create colour works whose colour derives from chance encounters with different formulas, objects and materials. These experiments, with their imprecise methodologies, investigative approach and association with the pre-industrial contain echoes of the proto-scientific aspects of alchemy. Through a variety of interventions, everyday items such as the skin of an onion or the leaves of a cabbage become the subject of myriad transformations.