Design and Art Australia Online

This solo exhibition Finding Colour by local artist Sine MacPherson, is a selection of paintings from the past twenty years developed from a range of unique and systematic frames of reference, each revealing inherent structures from their underlying sources, explored through the materiality of paint.
MacPherson’s interests lie in colour, the descriptions of natural phenomena and visual systems. All of her sources are everyday 'already mades’, such as painted objects, books, dictionaries, field guides, newspapers, photographs '- systems, images, and objects in her environment that generally have some relationship to colour. For example, several years ago MacPherson started circling the colour words in her old Pocket Oxford Dictionary [POD], but at the time there was no gold or silver paint available, and she was unsure how to create a painting from words. Then two things happened around the same time, the paint became available and she replaced her POD with a newer, much fatter, Australian version. She went on to read six PODs, and devised a system to paint all the colour words she found. She mused,
“The sources of my paintings aren’t meant to be obscure and usually the source is in the title or at least the title alludes to the source. Lexical Spectrum POD is the first of a series of six paintings. The series was poetically titled by a friend. I probably would have titled it All the Colour Words in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary”.
From dictionaries MacPherson went on to explore other reference books in her library, and has since made paintings from colour descriptions found in a number of different field guides. The painting Shark Colours was created from information found in a Department of Fisheries publication, resulting in an abstract painting of shimmering blocks of grey shades.
Allison Archer, Perth 2018