During my residency at SVFK I am creating my largest hand dyed and woven artwork to date. Made up of 10 stretched woven panels the final artwork will be 6 x 2.2m. I will also be creating a series of gestural paintings on canvas and paper exploring Nordic light while I am here.
Aug. 2021
Below is a description of the final show, which is a collaborative show with the Danish artist, Christina Augustesen, and will be happening in September 2022 at Officinet in Copenhagen with a parallel show in Aarhus at the Lene Bilgrav Gallery.
Christina Augustesen and Ptolemy Mann met through a shared obsession with complex colour. They both explore the way colour transitions from one hue to another, but through very different mediums; Augustesen, through the architectural engineering of light and Mann, through hand dyed and woven threads. For the first time they bring their work into the same gallery space to create a visual diary of how colour moves and shifts between darkness and light.
New Ways of Seeing and Feeling Colour
‘The Blue Hour’ refers to that very specific moment between warm and cool light at the end of the day just before night falls. This moment acts as a metaphor for how these two artists have captured the changing colour of the natural sky.
A series of wall and floor based light sculptures transition through chromatic hues using artificial and natural light echoing both darkness and daylight. Augustesen’s ‘Daylight Instruments’ explore natural light via three dimensional monoliths. The back wall of the gallery will display a monumental hand dyed and woven artwork; flashes of saturated ikat threads will gradually appear from left to right across the surface of the work culminating in a blast of vibrant colour reminiscent of the midnight Aurora Borealis. This will be the largest woven artwork Mann has created to date following her residency in Copenhagen at SVFK.
A further wall is illuminated by a series of small works on paper by both artists revealing printed and painted colour studies, that inform the creative process of making.
Our intention is to introduce an exhibition of work that engages an audience in new ways of seeing and feeling colour; capturing that elusive moment ‘in between’ two colours. By celebrating unfamiliar techniques and materials we hope to highlight exquisite craftsmanship through intelligent art making.
