These days most colour we experience is funnelled through the three channels of our LED screens, but the meaning of colour has always exceeded its manufactured gamut.

In association with the Drill Hall Gallery exhibition Light Source, this seminar will bring together scholars exploring the historical and contemporary understandings of colour. Not only its chromatics, but its energetics, therapeutics, psychedelics, synaesthetics, and symbolics.

This event will be held in Conference Room 1:02 in the Sir Roland Wilson Building.

Speakers

Douglas Kahn is Honorary Professor at Sydney College of the Arts, and Professor Emeritus at University of California at Davis and University of New South Wales. Books include Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT, 1999), Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California, 2013), and Energies in the Arts (MIT, 2019). In collaboration with Dr. Pia van Gelder (ANU), his current project is The Energies Artists Say.

Dr Jenny McFarlane has curated diverse public collections in the ACT. She is currently the inaugural Curator of Arts in Health, for the Canberra Health Services. She is the author of Concerning the Spiritual: The Influence of the Theosophical Society on Australian Artists 1890–1934 (https://scholarly.info) and numerous articles and chapters in this field. Other publications include Punk your graphics (De Medici, eX & QAGOMA) and eX de Medici: beautiful wickedness (QAGOMA) and The Theosophical Society as a wellspring of inspiration (Ethel Carrick Fox, NGA).

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and currently Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is a 2025 Sir William Dobell Fellow at the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory. His book on “artistic art histories” in Southeast Asia is forthcoming with Cornell University Press, and he is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press.

Tony Oates is a curator and writer, and director of the ANU Drill Hall Gallery. He has established a reputation for curating highly successfully, energetic thematic exhibitions and critically acclaimed artist surveys which historically contextualise artistic achievements.

Conveners

Dr Keren Hammerschlag is Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the ANU. Her book, The Chosen Race: Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting, is forthcoming with University of California Press in February 2026.

Dr Martyn Jolly is an honorary Associate Professor at the ANU School of Art and Design. His books include Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020), 2021, with Daniel Palmer; Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: the global career of showman daguerreotypist, J.W. Newland, 2020, with Elisa deCourcy; The magic lantern at work: witnessing, persuading, experiencing and connecting, 2020, with Elisa deCourcy; Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, 2006.

Seminar Abstracts

Douglas Kahn – Solarception: Not seeing blue in a second sense in the eye
A major discovery in sensory physiology has gone virtually unnoticed. It involves a very thin slice of blue synching humans and other mammals with the Sun. Blue isn’t seen but sensed by a third retinal cell. Rods and cones have been around forever, but it was not until the 1990s that intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) became known. They function as nothing less than a second sense in the eye, which joins the ear in harbouring two senses. Because ipRGCs dies on the tongue, I call them solar retinal cells or solar retinals, and their corresponding sense, solarception. A clock is the wrong image for the circadian because solarception is a spatial relation–an individual’s position in the solar system–not a temporal one, let alone a mechanistic device. What naming might do, why it should be ecological, and how Plato’s extramission, the eye emitting light, helps, will be discussed.

Jenny McFarlane – What is colour?
While Jonathon Crary describes early Modernism as an efflorescence of scientific exploration, for many the very terms of scientific vision were real and pressing questions. When the charismatic leader of the Theosophical Society, Mme Blavatsky analysed the concerns of her age in 1877 she saw a ‘death-grapple of Science with Theology for infallibility’ – ‘a conflict of ages’. She positioned the contribution of the Theosophical Society as the negotiation of this contest – a third way. While the Theosophical Society was enormously influential for the way artists as diverse as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Alexander Scriabin worked with colour, one of the most significant international sites for this contest was Sydney. Here, on the northern shores of Sydney Harbour, scientific ocularcentrism was challenged with visualisation strategies learnt from India. The ‘third eye’ was valued over the physical or mechanical eye, and colour, perceived clairvoyantly, was routinely explored and debated. This short paper will explore the context of this debate as it unfolded around Alexander Hector’s Colour Music Organ (1910-1958) and Roy de Maistre’s 1919 Colour in Art exhibition, and their radical negotiation of colour and the real.

Roger Nelson – Comets, device-dependent colours, and unmeasured ribbons (in Southeast Asia)
Speaking about the oil paintings made for a solo exhibition held in Bangkok in 2023, Supawich Weesapen (b. 1997) said: “To me, RGB colours are natural.” Beyond being a declaration of generational affinity with digital experience, what meaning can be made with this statement? An echo reverberating between device-dependent colours and more-than-human nature appears also in Vague Dog, a video made by the artist Sriwhana Spong (b. 1979) in 2024 and first exhibited at the Busan Biennale that year. Spong proposes that the “vivid glow of energy” in the work, created using a heat-sensing camera, enables us to ask: “What kind of creature is this?” This leads me to wonder, what kinds of creatures are these artworks? What might they have to do with astronomy or the military, or with art history or magic? How might they bring new and old technologies together in the mercurial space of colour?