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Colour lives within a tension. On one side: the ceaseless instability of light frequencies as they move through the world, reflecting off surfaces, shifting with every change in illumination, angle, and atmosphere. On the other: the brain’s insistence on order with the powerful, largely unconscious mechanisms of colour constancy that smooth over that flux, resolve the ambiguity, and deliver to consciousness a world of stable, nameable hues. Between these two forces, the objective variability of the signal and the subjective drive toward coherence, colour happens. It is never simply out there in the world, nor purely constructed within the mind, but suspended in the negotiation between them.

The Frequency of Things asks what remains when colour constancy is removed? What remains when that same unstable nature of colour becomes even more unstable by being driven by chance? What does a viewer encounter when there is nothing to name, nothing to identify, just the presence of the isolated frequencies?

The Frequency of Things proposes an out-of-object experience of colour. An encounter with chromatic presence that has been dissected from its origin, driven by chance and as a result yet carrying within it the full spectral signature of that origin. The colours in these images were harvested from known things: objects, surfaces, the visible world. Their unique chromatic frequencies were extracted and isolated from the forms that previously “housed” them.  

The work begins with colour photographs of familiar things. These are not the final images but raw material, a way of harvesting the chromatic frequencies that ordinarily arrive bound to the world. Each photograph is processed digitally, one by one, through an algorithm designed to extract just its colours. The unique spectral signatures that the camera recorded when light returned from those surfaces. These extracted frequencies are then used in the analogue colour darkroom. There they are exposed onto photo-sensitive paper using chance as the key compositional driver: the duration, sequence, and distribution of each exposure is subject to contingency, released from the control that pictorial representation and beyond recognition. The result is an image that carries the chromatic frequencies of recognisable things — the red of that rose, the particular blue of that sky — but from which every trace of form, contour, and legibility has been stripped away.

Chance in The Frequency of Things is not introduced as a technique or a concept. It is the operative condition of the work — the force that keeps light, and therefore the image, permanently in formation. Each image produced by this project is therefore singular and unrepeatable. The same colour, projected through the same apparatus, will not produce the same result twice. What chance determines — the precise accumulation of light on the silver surface, the subtle variations in its intensity as it moves, the exact chemical response at every point of contact — cannot be replicated. These are not errors or imprecisions. They are the specific events that constitute the image, the irreducible particulars of a single occurrence among the many possible occurrences that the same conditions could have generated. Every image is one path taken through an infinite field of contingency.

The resulting images are unstable and unbound — held open within the many possible occurrences from which they emerged. They do not resolve into a final statement. They carry within them the tension of what they almost were, the shadow of alternate versions that chance foreclosed in the act of producing this one. This is not instability as failure but instability as condition: an image that remains genuinely open, that cannot be closed by looking at it, because the forces that made it were never fully in control. The viewer does not stand before a conclusion. They stand before an event that is still, in some sense, unfolding.

This project invites the experience of colour as a presence. The frequencies are what there is to encounter. The work asks nothing of the viewer except that they meet what is actually in front of them — light, recorded, as light. The colour in the images carries within a history: it was taken from the world, extracted from actual objects and surfaces, before being returned to light. There is an archaeology to these frequencies. The viewer may not recover what was there, but they are receiving something that was sensing familiarity without recognition. The mind reaches toward naming and finds only sensation.