Tone Saastad is associate professor at the Department of Fine Art at Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Colour has been a recurring theme in all her artistic production, mainly through textile media, most recently in her Pixel project in which stories were abstracted and told at pixel level.
The project that will be presented in Rom8 is a further development of the site-specific work Topographies of Colour; Spode (2013), which Tone Saastad developed for the exhibition Vociferous Void as part of the artistic research project Topographies of the Obsolete. This collaborative project deals with questions relating to the post-industrial landscape, and it relates specifically to the abandoned factory Spode Works in Stoke-on-Trent (UK).
Like a colour archaeologist, Tone Saastad mapped and filed the colours of the abandoned factory, its history and day-to-day activities by photographing hanging files and the filing system that had accumulated over the years as a result of the factory's procedures. The file folders, full of hidden information, and almost abstract stripes of colour, were projected in a room on site, where endlessly shifting mixes of colour formed a colour and light installation to enter and become part of.
In the white cube Rom8, Topographies of Colour; Spode is not in place, but in space. What does context mean? What possibilities does an empty space offer? The white cube enables a process in which colour and light are the point of departure for a new investigation
