Colour Archive was born out of an interest in creating an archive of historically and conceptually charged pigments. Since 2013, Roch-Cuerrier has built a collection of pigments across many projects: raw pigments are an integral part of her approach and practice. The pigments in this archive do not come from traditional processes of producing pigments, rather, they originate from human-made universal and/or symbolic objects. In the era of the Anthropocene, these new manmade pigments. byproducts of human constructs, are imbued with new meanings. Through these unusual pigments, an ephemera is revealed.
In summer 2018, while the artist was living in Mexico City to take part in the SOMA Summer residency, she visited Biquini Wax EPS, an independent contemporary art space. The artist approached their team to collaborate on a project during her time at SOMA. As part of this collaboration, she created a pigment that would act as a snapshot of the physical space as she encountered it that summer. Over the course of a few visits to the space, Roch-Cuerrier sanded a portion of the outside wall of the building and ground it down to pigments. The resulting colour named Biquini Blue is reminiscent of Mexico Blue, a darker shade of cyan-blue, which is an integral part of the country’s history.
JULIE ROCH-CUERRIER 