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“The Star Tablets were originally created as props for a performance lecture at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Cornwall. It seems a long time ago now but somehow magical. Surrounded by 30 woman holding these panels to their abdomens, I read out a text I’d written on the colour black, that sits between being lecture and prose. It spoke about a marginalised branch of semiotics in Western culture that links the colour black to concepts of healing, (E)earth, autumn and the Sirius Star. The text was initially written for Crying the Neck, a project I worked on with Lucy Stein, for a window vitrine at NICC in Brussels.
The Bideford and Lamp Black pigments I used to make the panels felt as if they were materials that held resonance with this text – I liked what they symbolised. Lamp Black is traditionally made from the soot of burnt vegetable oil. It is a soft, oily black typically used in Kohl eyeliner, whose long history of use is as much about beauty as it is about protection. Bideford Black, is a soft black pigment flecked with graphite that is mined from a coal seam in Devon. It’s an earthy colour but the graphite gives it a glitter that makes me think of the night sky.”
Nina Royle is an artist based in West Cornwall. Her work is centred in painting but is also made as text, performance and utilitarian object. In these works mythologies, observations of the phenomenal within the everyday, and the alchemic possibilities of pigmented materials conflate, to be understood through one another. A collection of her writing was recently co-published by Kingsgate Project Space, London and Folium. This accompanied her first, London-based solo exhibition at Kingsgate, in July 2021.
www.ninaroyle.co.uk
