
Blue
Blue is released from the surface and made spatial, enveloping the body as a field without fixed edges.
- Full title
- Stratachrome Blue
- Artist
- David Spriggs
- Date
- 2012
- Dimensions
- 262 × 326 × 650 cm
- Materials
- Blue paint on layered transparencies
- Exhibited
- Abrons Arts Center, New York; RAW Gallery of Architecture and Design, Winnipeg
Blue begins with a colour that often appears to recede, then gives it physical scale. A saturated chromatic volume extends through the gallery, enveloping the viewer while refusing a stable boundary. Its depth is real and optical at once: pigment is distributed across transparent planes, but the apparent field gathers only from particular positions. Move, and blue thickens, thins, or opens to the space behind it.
The work holds distance and immersion together. Blue carries associations of sky and water, melancholy and infinity, yet the body encounters it at close range, as pressure, light, and atmosphere. What cultural convention treats as remote becomes immediate. The installation does not settle the colour into one meaning. It allows symbolic memory and physical sensation to act upon one another, so that blue is experienced less as a surface than as a condition of seeing.


A colour without boundary
The image is continually remade by light and movement. From one angle, blue gathers into an almost solid presence. From another, it dissolves into the surrounding architecture. This instability places perception at the centre of the work: colour is encountered as something active, contingent, and capable of reorganising space.

