Widely considered to be the earliest synthetic pigment, Egyptian blue was invented out of necessity over 5000 years ago, as blue pigments were highly valued but only rarely encountered in nature. In recent years, advanced technological industries such as biomedicine and telecommunications have exploited it for its chemical properties, which allow it to reflect infrared light, among other things.
In Blue Transmutations, a range of manipulations are made by painter and media artist Liat Grayver using fine and coarse Egyptian blue pigment on thin sheets of Japanese paper. As the coarse pigment is not easily dissolved or absorbed, the painter’s actions and the inherent inconsistencies of the hand-made paper converge in a volatile and fully unpredictable creative context. The microscopic glass particles of the pigments glimmer as the operations are captured by a special black and white camera used by the Nanoparticle Systems Engineering Lab at ETH Zurich, the results varyingly resembling stellar associations or more abstract forms. Three separate montages of the footage, remodelled and composed by video artist Marcus Nebe, are paired with and projected onto paintings selected from a collection of explorations—also using Egyptian blue on Japanese paper—into density and viscosity, and again reactivity, but now informed by the previous experiments.
The work is in collaboration with Dr. Robert Nißler (particle synthesis) and Marcus Nebe (video) and sponsored by the Nanoparticle Systems Engineering Lab, the metal workshop of the Physik-Institut, at the University of Zürich and the Collegium Helveticum.
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