Bloom Residuum

About the work

Bloom Residuum occupies a warmer register within Spectral Taxonomy. Mauve, pink and violet gather across forty-seven paper lamellae, holding colour at the point where vitality, memory and disappearance begin to overlap.

Each sheet is torn by hand, stained with rooibos, green and black teas, embossed and then worked with transparent washes of mauve and pink inks and acrylics. The surfaces do not respond uniformly. Some absorb pigment deeply, others resist it, while occasional chromatic traces appear unexpectedly. Difference is allowed to remain visible across the field.

The fugitive associations of mauve are central to the work. Colour becomes less a fixed description than something vulnerable to time, light and exposure. Rather than presenting bleaching as a single event, the work attends to the unstable passage between chromatic intensity and its withdrawal.

The composition moves from left to right through an irregular rhythm. Golden-ratio spacing supplies an underlying order, but the lamellae resist complete regularity. Edges lift, settle and fray; embossed structures catch light differently; individual sheets maintain their own material behaviour.

The work brings the chromatic vitality associated with coral spawning into tension with bleaching, allowing abundance and ecological stress to occupy the same visual field. Colour is therefore neither decorative nor illustrative. It becomes evidence of a condition that can change.

On a single lamella, written in graphite, the haiku reads:

Soft bloom without scent
Violet twilight pulses
Grief becomes petal

The text remains quiet within the work, a small articulation embedded within the larger material field.

Bloom Residuum asks what remains perceptible while change is still taking place. Its mauves and pinks are not simply residues of something lost. They hold the viewer within the moment when colour is still present, still vulnerable and still capable of being witnessed.