Colours, lost and found by Lily Prigent and David Shillinglaw.

David and Lily have been making inks from local ingredients, foraging in Margate parks, beaches, meadows, streets and gardens. The result is an ongoing collection of pigments and inks, and a series of drawings and collages made with them.

“We collect and study found objects and the raw ingredients of this precarious rainbow, a kind of cosmic soup mixing pinecones and red brick, flowers, fruits and rusty copper coins. We are playing with the process of making colour, trying to connect with the natural world on our doorstep, celebrating these incidental tones and hues. The process feels magical, almost alchemy, a kind of clumsy science experiment that always surprises us.”

This installation at Bon Volks gives the work its own space to talk to the people who live in this area, and we hope that our work will make people think differently about their environment, giving colour and life to the everyday materials around us.

“Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”-Paul Klee

“With colour one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.” -Henri Matisse

“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way... things I had no words for.” -Georgia O’Keeffe