Chlorophilia : Artists : Alistair McClymont

Magenta is colour we see, but one that does not exist in a physical form, it reveals something internal. Our relationship with the 'real' world is through our senses and an internal interpretation. Our eyes are sensitive to wavelengths of light at particular wavelengths, each wavelength of the visible spectrum can be called a colour, using a prism reveals all of these available colours, but magenta is missing.

Isaac Newton noticed that combining the light from 2 prisms and overlapping the blue and red ends of each spectrum creates magenta, this artwork recreates Newton's experiment. Magenta is an extra-spectral colour, meaning it is missing from the spectrum because there is no wavelength for magenta, but our eyes see the combination of two wavelengths and magenta is created by our brain interpreting the two colours in this way.

This simple act demonstrates that our interpretation of the world differs in incredible ways from 'reality', we view the world through a narrow band of senses and even then create an internal image that differs again from this given information.

Alistair McClymont's work is a continuing process of discovery and experimentation, ranging across a variety of materials and practices. Each piece follows the last in a continual journey of investigation into cultural and physical phenomena. Recent work is underlined by a search for what it is to be human.

At times artworks take the form of direct demonstration, or experimentation: phenomena are removed from the world and reduced to their essence. At other times the artworks are formed by phenomena: the sculpture, or image is created by a process that is out of his control and the final work points to that process. Underlying all the work is a deep concern for beauty and reason

www.alistairmcclymont.com