To begin the collaboration,we took a few tentative steps in the direction of a conversation about colour. We began, in that first week, by choosing a colour palette together. We have both been somewhat limited in our use of colour in our previous work, so in order to make decisions about a new palette, we took a long walk to the local art supply store and discussed the associations we had regarding different colours. The array of ‘speedball’ and ‘jacquard’ screen printing inks available was huge and we settled on a small selection of pinks, florescent reds, golds, coppers and a velvety black. This small step allowed us to start a dialogue together around our conceptual and visual expectations of the collaboration.
After we’d decided on the colours that we would work with collectively, we both began to generate collections of words based around our experiences of America so far. These words and phrases in both English and French became the foundations for images we began to carve, cut out and generate over the following weeks. We experimented with the pigments and palette we’d created, in screen printing, marbling and mokuhanga. As the words lived with us, the imagery they inspired took shape.
