Output details

James Hugonin

This output represents two strands of Davey’s research. Its close analysis and interpretation of an artist’s work continues his phenomenological interest in the distinct worlds created by works of art, developed out of Heidegger’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s belief that works of art make distinct and unique worlds of knowledge visible. While their discussion is limited to the possibility of these worlds, Davey puts this belief into practice, examining particular worlds and knowledge revealed in, and peculiar to an artist’s work.

In parallel, the text continues Davey’s work on the relationship between colour and light, specifically the insights given by artists using colour in their practice. Unlike studies that discuss the history, science and practise of colour, Davey again adopts a phenomenological approach to asks what we learn of colour through an artist’s use and understanding of it, and what insights this understanding of colour can offer us in our experience of the world, informed by the framework of natural theology.

The Hugonin essay relates colour to embodiment, landscape and the sublime, reinforcing some of the themes found in Wittgenstein’s ‘Remarks on Colour’. It also reinforces an understanding of colour as a subjective experience and light as an objective universal material, further developing Davey’s doctoral proposition that the interrelationship of colour and light provided a model arising from visual knowledge that potentially enabled talk of metanarratives despite post-modernist scepticism.

This investigation was developed through two exhibitions/ catalogues at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, using the insights provided by eight artists, then in a Special Issue of the journal of the International Colour Association, which asked what insights artists brought to the knowledge of colour. The co-authored editorial became the first draft of an essay on Hugonin and Davey was then invited to develop the essay by Hugonin for the Ingelby publication.