‘Colour folds II: movement between minor and major modes’ was shown at Space At Design at the University of Leeds in 2024. It involved a site-specific installation of paintings, digital photographs and video projections in the main gallery space, as well as source material shown in the vitrines of the Foyer Gallery. The latter included images of different painting stages, drawings, photographs, notebook pages, watercolour studies, artist’s books and reference books to make visible various aspects of the research process.

The exhibition relates to my practice research project ‘Colour folds: the painted, photographed and filmed’ which takes its roots within painting as abstraction of visual and conceptual processes that is juxtaposed with indexical visual methods, such as photography and video, through a conceptual folding process. The project is informed by historical and contemporary concerns with the fold as philosophical and material concept. The creative concept ‘Folded Colour Space’ entails navigation within two or three-dimensional contexts, as a juggling of different signifying entities and as means to introduce changes of direction or perspective, with analogies in mathematics and natural sciences. It provides a conceptual model to engage in performativity, variation in spatio-temporal relations, and considerations of quality (of visual syntax) within and across diverse visual categories. It involves an oscillation between minor and major modes (Deleuze and Guattari) – here between the indexicality of the mundane through photography and video (as minor) and the iconic dimension of abstract painting (as major).

A conversation with curator Dr Helen Clarke took place at the closing event of the exhibition followed by a Q&A with the attending public.