The Weight of Blue

4-metre ultramarine panel with silver nitrate, and fish gelatin,
a score on how to paint your house on 16mm (2:18)

When dry, put it into a skin or purse, and rejoice in it. Bear in mind that it is a rare gift to know how to make it well. You must also know that it is rather the art of maidens than of men to make it. But beware of old women.
The Weight of Blue started from chapter LXII of Il Libro dell’Arte,
“Of the nature of azzurro oltre marino (ultramarine blue), and how it is prepared”, where pigment-making is described as the art of maidens than of men (Herringham), or for pretty girls (Thompson). This medieval instructional text consists of pigments used in Farbtafeln (lapis lazuli, orpiment, cinnabar, minever), followed by chapters on how to paint bodies, trees, and wounds. Such instructions reveal pigments not only as materials but as choreographies of bodies and repeated acts of extraction.

This research unfolded across the Stedelijk Museum depot, the Old Holland Paint Factory, several paint shops in Amsterdam, and the darkroom of Filmwerkplaats, where I learned to prepare handmade film emulsion. Moving between these sites also meant moving between different regimes of chemical exposure. Many of the historical pigments, including orpiment and cinnabar, share forms of toxicity with chemicals used in the darkroom. Their handling requires specialised procedures, and knowledge is acquired through repeated bodily encounters with substances that can accumulate in or harm the body. Exposure thus becomes part of labour, linking pigment production, conservation, paint manufacturing, and analogue filmmaking.

The installation carries the traces of these overlapping material histories. The Weight of Blue, the four-metre ultramarine panel was made with ultramarine pigment that I mulled by hand following Cennini's instructions. In its painted surface are residues of silver nitrate and fish gelatin from the 16mm film emulsion prepared in the darkroom

In a score on how to paint your house (16mm, 2:18), the same silver-fish gelatin emulsion was used to record myself painting a wall. The action follows instructions given by a paint-shop employee after I repeated a question first posed by a painting conservator: “Have you painted your house?”. The film approaches house painting as a score through which technical knowledge and embodied labour are transmitted.

The work asks: How can performing these instructions challenge or reframe narratives of women’s work and representation in the history of pigment-making? What parallels exist between the chemical instability of pigments and that of handmade film emulsion?

As part of the public programme, the installation is activated through a live reading. The reading concludes with an invitation for audiences to rewrite Cennini's recipe for ultramarine, extending the instructional structure of Il Libro dell'Arte into a shared act of authorship.

The project is supported by
Athanor NOW as part of Troubling Pigments (after Polke)

image credit: Hasan Özgür Top, Fransisca Angela, and Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten

Newsletter