Violet and the War
Text by Sally O"Reilly

In every story there is a fulcrum - a point towards which all histories seem to fly and at which plots seem to turn. This might be a place, a person, an object or an apparently random act, but is always the result of the build-up of actions and space, as well as time, from all directions, not just the past. Now, a story has an arbitrary boundary in time-space, delineated by the author for the sake of readability. But take the fulcrum and one strand of the story - a character, a place, an idea - and pull it beyond the boundary of the story like a ribbon; then pull it some more and lay it within the boundary of another story, or through the perimeters of many stories; pull a ribbon from one fulcrum all the way to another, and this is what people call the march of history, progress, cultural evolution, cause and effect. Repeat this for all stories and this is the world - an impossible maypole dance between all villages.

Let's take a soldier's barrack in the Second World War as our first fulcrum. He's lying on his bed, or polishing his boots, thinking of his wife, and has just eaten army rations - tinned food, most likely. Tinned food is irradiated these days to preserve it, but during the war it was chemically treated. This chemical was derived from coal tar, an organic substance extracted from fossilised trees, and is just one of a tranche of organic chemicals with a number of applications, current and defunct, from immunology to saccharine. The discovery that sparked these innovations was made in 1856 by an eighteen year-old chemistry student, William Henry

Perkin, who was searching for a synthetic alternative to quinine. He was washing the residue of a failed experiment down the sink when he noticed a vivid colour bleeding away down the plug hole. Here the story folds back on itself, back to our soldier in the barracks.

The colour in Perkin's sink was a shade of purple, which he called "Tyrian Purple" but was later referred to as mauve. The name of the woman on the soldier's mind was Violet. As a result of Perkin's discovery, the origin of the many hues of purples around us changed from organic plants and animals to man-made synthesis. The soldier's life too was crossing some sort of line, from organic to regimented, from passivity to action and, most horrifically, from love to violence. And here is the serendipity of language, the writer's luck: the soldier was pondering the shift from Violet to violence.

But returning to Perkin: his "Tyrian Purple" is a reference to ancient colour, a secret hue which vanished with its manufacturers - the Phoenicians of the eastern Mediterranean, who died out or moved on after the Turks' sacking of Constantinople in 1453. The name comes from the coastal port of Tyre, southern Lebanon, where it is known that dyers produced a purplish pigment from shellfish. While researching a book on colour, the journalist Victoria Finlay explored the region but failed to uncover the secret.

Eventually, however, on a trip to Mexico, she tracked down one remaining artisan who obtained mauve dye from sea snails. The process is archaic and crude: the snail is gently squeezed, it "vomits" onto the collecting skeins, is left to rest a while and then squeezed again. No wonder, then, that this mauve was so precious and coveted, so regal, sacred even. A bed sheet's worth of dye, about 1.5 grams, would require the mucus of some twelve thousand Murex molluscs. Think of the billions of sea snails used for the cloth of Cleopatra's sails, Julius Caesar's toga, the skirts of the Mixtec people of Mexico and the cloaks of numerous European royalty.

So here is another fulcrum in the web - the embattled sea snail and its priceless cargo - from which the threads wind outwards, starting with the Minoan civilisation in Crete, circa 1900 BC. Greek legend credits the discovery to Heracles's dog, his mouth running purple on the beach, while by 1983 the Japanese had nearly made the snails extinct, as the life was squeezed out of them, along with the purple. The conflicts, legislations and covetous deeds that spiral from this point are dazzling.

Although before Perkin's discovery, there had been other natural dye substitutes - purples, violets and mauves made from lichen and madder, and Pope John Paul II's "Cardinal's Purple" of 1464, extracted from the Kermes insect - he did open the spectrum up to the masses, make it affordable for all. This was just in time for the Arts and Crafts Movement some fifteen years later. In 1880 Morris wrote, in Hopes and Fears for Art, a lecture delivered at the London Institute: "at a time when we so long to know the reality of all that has happened ... I hardly know how to say that this interweaving of the Decorative Arts with the history of the past is of less importance than their dealings with the life of the present: for should not these memories also be a part of our daily life?"

An aesthetic object becomes animated by the present, which is yet another meeting point for all that has gone before and all that is yet to transpire.

These and many, many other histories run through "Violet and the War", both personal and official, past and present. The paintings have grown from this organic delta of stories and memories, which are, of course, simply stories we tell ourselves. Meanwhile, the soldier has been brought to "the crossways of life and writes Violet a letter. He talks of the consequences of his present situation, but also the false limits of human experience: "I have loved you always not in this life alone, but from [the] beginning of time. Our love will go on, beyond our years..."

For further information or images please contact Andrea Harari or Emma Hill on 020 7833 2674 or email: emmahilleagle@aol.com