Info: Series of 6 glass sculptures. Sizes approx 5 – 15 cm.
Text: No Word for Blue began as a collection of artillery fragments that I gathered from sand dune landscapes in nature reserves throughout Germany, which were also all former military training areas.
These corroded fragments were then cast into glass using an Ancient Mesopotamian technique. The recipe and methodology were referenced from the tablet VAT 16445 in the Yale Babylonian Collection, a “Glassmaker’s Ratio for uqnu merqu” in Akkadian. The recipe is for glass that is produced to approximate the colour of lapis lazuli. Glass has been associated with birth and the kiln a kind of womb.
Despite the fact that the Akkadian language never developed a specific word for the colour blue, recent research states that perception of colour for the Akkadians was not based on “hue” but rather on brightness and saturation (Thavapalan). This debunks persistent, colonial theories that the Akkadians’ colour vocabulary was rudimentary. Their experience of colour went far beyond a word, encompassing senses and power.
No Word for Blue disarms the fragments transforming them into fragile glass, and contemplates perception in relation to objects of violence.
I gathered the fragments as pieces of the landscape that told the story of what had taken place there. Nestled in the sand, eaten by the passage of time and corroded by the elements. I grappled with this evidence. I love this landscape and I wanted to decolonise and decontextualise the desert or sand from violence and war.
I stuck my hand into the sand, excavated the fragments and studied them with forensic fervour. I decided to return the pieces, disarmed, back to the sand where they came from and not erase their history but imbue them with another vocabulary.
I spotted a disused glassworks in one of the nature reserves near the dunes. They used the wood from the trees and the sand to produce glass. A self-contained ecology of production.
I wasn’t sure about these fragments. Witnessing, from afar, overwhelming depravity affecting so much of the world, unimaginable violence. I’ve fled war personally. I felt blue. But perhaps even if we don’t choose a specific word, we can still look and we can still feel and we can still know and we can still care.