The Yellow Chair

The Yellow Chair began with the memory of a yellow chair that accompanied everyday life in my home. What started as a personal recollection gradually developed into an artistic research project investigating how colour can function not only as something we perceive, but also as a way of remembering, relating, and producing knowledge.

Rather than reconstructing memory through representation, the project approached colour as a living material. Through natural pigment making, painting, moving image, writing, and participatory workshops, I explored how colour emerges through relationships between people, plants, materials, memories, and the more-than-human world. Making pigments from locally collected plants shifted attention from colour as a manufactured product to colour as a process of ecological encounter, where plants became collaborators in artistic research rather than merely sources of raw material.

Working with natural pigments also opened broader questions about the histories embedded in colour. The project considered how pigments have been shaped by extraction, trade, colonial expansion, and industrial production, while exploring alternative ways of engaging with colour through care, locality, and material reciprocity. Rather than separating personal memory from environmental and political histories, The Yellow Chair investigates how they become entangled through artistic practice.

Throughout the research, making became both the subject and the method of inquiry. Collecting plants, producing pigments, painting, and animating were not simply techniques used to illustrate ideas but ways of thinking through materials and relationships. Participatory workshops invited others to contribute their own memories, gestures, and material explorations, transforming individual experiences into collective processes of learning and making. These encounters demonstrated how artistic knowledge can emerge through collaboration between human and more-than-human participants.

The project culminated in an installation bringing together handmade pigments, paintings, workshop artefacts, botanical materials, moving images, and written reflections. Rather than presenting a finished narrative, the exhibition functioned as an open research environment-an evolving archive of experiments, conversations, material transformations, and shared encounters.

The Yellow Chair became the foundation for my ongoing artistic practice. The participatory methods developed through this research continue to evolve across workshops, exhibitions, publications, and collaborative projects, exploring how colour can become a medium for reflecting on memory, ecology, material culture, and the intertwined histories of human and more-than-human worlds.