Making...Making Research, Leeds College of Art, Leeds

The output is a short film about gender, colour and place. Dr Lewis Paul, collaborated with fellow artist, Dr Sarah Taylor. In addition to the conception of the film, Dr Paul contributed to the process of visual reframing & staging Burris-Meyer’s charts and subsequent filmic montage. The film charts the lost world of Elizabeth Burris-Meyer, the American colour theorist, who has been written out of the colour history of Art & Art and design.
Research Process: The aims of the research set out to investigate possible narrative intersections between film, fine art and painting histories and processes. The project investigates how extant historical colour samples, charts and concepts developed in the 1940s by American colour theorist Elizabeth Burris-Meyer might be contextually re-evaluated. The method included collating Burris’ rare surviving colour books and returning them to where Burris lived and worked. Taylor and Paul took Burris books with them on a journey back to the light of Connecticut, USA to explore the complexity of her colour fields. The film gathers the remnants of Burris-Meyer’s surviving work and reveals how wondrous this colour work is.
Research Insights: The film generates new insights and contexts around historical gendered art and design references, and hierarchies of theoretical contexts of colour, celebrating the importance of female colourists against the canon of male dominance in painting. The research frames aesthetic hierarchies between concepts of art and concepts of domestic design within the evolution of gendered notions of colour.

Work shown: Little Pink Bush - Digital Film

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