A Riot of Koi-Ful Colour

It started with sorting through travel photographs and remembering the sound of hundreds of koi fish vying for food.

Another photograph carried similar colours and chaotic patterns. 

I kept scrolling, adding images to an album I called Koi-ful Colour. Warm, joyful combinations of reds, oranges, yellows and pinks. I wanted to spell colour with a K but the misspelling felt more incorrect than clever. Even mixing the order of place and date, as I compiled the gallery felt strange. A legacy of careful, diaristic record-keeping perhaps. 

I continued gathering plants, places and patterns. 

A pleasing collage of colour, images and small memories formed. 

It is not hard to see the appeal of pretty social feeds, I thought. Pleasure in the sum of its parts. Why are we so drawn to the symmetry of matching colour?

I wondered if with no attached memory, my photographs would feel emptier. Or does colour carry enough energy to intrigue?

I went to bed, fatigued from the glow and speed of the screen. 

The colours stayed.

The next morning I woke to blue sky, starkly different from the deep grey day before. Some weeks the glory of summer and the bitterness of winter sit side by side. 

Later more scrolling, but this time through open source museum archives of preserved textile heritage. These are small fragments of cloth, laid out flat in all states of age and disrepair. From these scans, I digitally collate beautiful standalone patchwork artworks. 

I looked at the stained and worn cloth pieces. Each scrap held memories long gone. To someone, once, this was theirs. 

To an archivist they are culturally important.

To me, there is only colour and pattern.

And a faint distant nostalgia. 

Still the work brims with a vibrant energy. A riot of colour arranged into something new.

The Wild Hours is the writing practice of Australian artist and writer,  Isa June. A collection of essays, photographs and observations that explore the shimmer and ache of motherhood, domesticity, memory, travel, aging and the creative journey as an artist.