Anatomy of Blue

'Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession...'. So begins Maggie Nelson's Bluets. The world is blue, writes Rebecca Solnit, 'at its edges and in its depths'. And, following Colette, the art historian Carol Mavor pledges her membership in this club of blue, joining the ranks of those 'connoisseurs of blue' who can never seem to get enough of lapis lazuli and indigo. For blue speaks volumes about the horizon, the sea, travelling and wandering, and memories about all of that. 

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Then, of course, there is Goethe's tragic Young Werther: his ill-fated blue coat was present at both the first stirrings of a deep desire and the final stirrings of the deepest despair. This is how blue rolls.

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The images here are accompanied by one or two lines from a larger collection of illustrated prose poetry. The colour blue, and cyanotype, is used to explore memory, emotion and the 'end of the affair'.