A grapheme synaesthete’s A–Z of colour: A textile practitioner’s response

This research looks at the physical properties of colour and the colours that can only be experienced by the individual grapheme colour synaesthetes considered in the study. These colours are particularly exceptional, as unless their existence can be verified in another form they must remain as private individual experiences that could be described, but not physically witnessed, by others.
The research addresses the problems of colour reconstruction from a professional’s expertise and knowledge of dyeing and weaving, with experience of colour matching within the textile industry.
This work explores the re-construction of the alphabet colours of five grapheme synaesthetes, and observes the interrelationship between these colours once they have been categorised and re-located into a series of woven ‘colour charts’, using the ‘paint chart’ format as ‘a platter to serve colour’ as Joseph Albers once remarked. I have used the matched colours as ‘ready mades’, applying order systems to create stand-alone art works that are my responses as an artist and maker to the synaesthetes’ colours, using colour categorisations to create boundaries within the broad jurisdiction of a colour label. I was interested to see if once the colours had been re-organized and woven into the ‘colour chart’ format, whether their colours would remain as identifiable to the individual synaesthetes and whether these colours could hold different qualities for them particularly as some of the participants remarked that they did not like many of their personal colour photisms. This work has crossed the boundaries from internal ‘brain generated’ colour perceptions to ‘material colour’, opening up the opportunity to share, in part, the colour experiences of five grapheme synaesthetes’. The work undertaken for this study has generated multiple possibilities for future new art work, this is discussed in chapter 7.