The above are part of the exhibition "Words and their Meanings", a project organised by the Academic Writing Centre at NUI Galway that explores the changing meaning of words (for more info, click here). I chose the word "purple".
From the description: "Pulse" explores the changing meaning of the word purple in the context of the complexity of the human face. Skin reveals a lot of red underneath its top layer, but veins appear blue rather than red. Blue and red make up the colour purple. The human face is intriguing—its form and shape shift. The colouring is always in flux. Faces can turn crimson in anger or shame or from physical exhaustion. We still use the word purple at times to describe a face in such a state. So the different meanings are not as delineated as we might think, even if it may be odd to think of ‘purple blood’. "Emergence" relates the change in meaning to the physical process of painting. Scratches in the thicker layers of purple paint reveal the red underneath; she plays with the idea of scratching away at time. Purple was often used to describe blood. In painting, if a colour bleeds into another colour, pigment particles are carried by the flow of water beyond the mark of the brush. This process captured here represents the changes that the word has gone through, with purple bleeding into red and red bleeding into purple in the transparent parts of the painting.  detail, work in progress My "put-a-bird-on-it" phase is over, bar some exceptions - now boats keep appearing in my paintings.
Today this scene in my bedroom...  ... may have led to this sketch:  detail, work-in-progress And I realised for the last few days I must have been inspired by the colours of my breakfast:   detail of another work-in-progress
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