The experience that we call Colour is multi-faceted,
appearing in manifold guises across many disciplines. Yet colour
remains almost totally neglected as a concrete aspect of objects
and of visual material in cross cultural analyses.
Unlike form, colour in conventional western terms is constructed
as an ambiguous and subjective component of the world. In order
to quantify colour as a ‘stimulus’ cognitive science
and psychology has calibrated colours as measurable wavelengths
of light, yet in other arenas colours are considered as extravagantly
expressive and intuitive. Colour is on the one hand construed
as merely decorative, trivial, feminine, and on the other taken
as a foundational aspect of the Enlightenment. The social sciences
have, for the most part, contrued colour as a serious subject
in two ways: as a matter of classification linked to language
and as symbolic. Both of these approaches, while productive
in many ways, serve to de -materialise colours making them stand
for something beyond their surface presence. While colour as
an aspect of identity has been a part of the fast moving critical
debate on cultural difference and globalism, there remains an
often naive and colonial stance towards the colours of material
objects produced in such a climate.
How can we expand what we know about ‘colour’.
Is it socially constructed or all in the mind?
What do colours make possible? What does colour do?
Might we profitably consider colours as integral to cultural
expression and social change?
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Dr Diana Young
Postdoctoral Fellow
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research
The Australian National University
