_{Working Palette 1-10, 2023
                               Black and white photographs, hand coloured and retouched with photographic dye
                               30.5cm. x 40.6cm (dry mounted on board)}

A palette is a range of colours. It can be an object that is used to house colours, and a surface to mix colours. It is a resource, a tool, a beholder of alteration and a facilitator for creation.

In computer graphics, a palette is referred to as the set of available colours of which an image can be made. With colour profiles available on our software, our colour perception can relate to how we view on our screens. With commitment to the device, screens can infuse the way we perceive, and in return, redesign our visual understanding of it. With analogue film apps you can choose your film without buying it, choose an era, and recreate an old memory. On Snapseed, you can auto remove the background of a subject and replace it with ‘a better’ one, or with One Tap Beauty Make-up Editor you can perfectly face-tune your selfie. Modify your body with Youcam, and airbrush imperfection...

Tools are companions.

Thinning, smoothing, enhancing and reducing are all tied in with ways images are altered through ‘retouching’. From representations of events, bodies and products to food and location; our ever-changing tools provide us with access to morph realities.

Gesturing towards the plasticity of the medium, Working Palette is an ode to the craft of hand retouching, and the work of ‘maestro’ retoucher and teacher Kevin O’neill.

Hand printed  as black and white photographs and hand retouched; a range of colour blending techniques, brushwork and physical retouch masks have been used to make this work. Focusing on the interaction between hand and image, subjects involved are retouching products once readily available on the market, and the borrowed palettes of Kevin O’neill. Building up colour and working on these prints with photographic dye, the objects themselves become responsive, living. Seeping in and out of the frame, areas are left unfinished, and others, embellished. 

Working Palette from Working Palette, 2023
C-type handprint made from expired duplicate film