Sulphur

A Heaven and Hell of Colour

“Nymphs! you disjoin, unite, condense, expand,
And give new wonders to the chemist’s hand;
On tepid clouds the rising steam aspire,
Or fix in sulphur all its solid fire;

Erasmus Darwin The Botanic Garden “The Economy of Vegetation”: Canto I

I’ve been reading Phillip Ball’s Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001). I was introduced to his thinking through a recent pigment conference that I took part in this spring. Ball has a degree in Chemistry, a doctorate in Physics, is the longtime editor of Nature magazine and has written about everything from nano-technology to music and magic and water. And because he can get right down to the atomic level in explaining colour, he is filling in a lot of blanks for me. I hate to try to synthesize a complicated book into a few sentences but he does show the connective role that colour played between ancient craft and technical innovation; between organic plants and insects and the inorganic minerals and metals; between alchemy’s secret recipes and chemistry’s exacting push to recreate the world inside the lab. In the middle of reading this book, I got a package from my friend Meghan Price a small handful of greyish yellow crumbles from the mouth of volcano in Iceland which of course sent me down a sulphur rabbit hole.

Sulphur crystallizes yellow, burns blue. and melts red. For the alchemists it was one of three primes, a fiery, soulful intermediary between earth or body (represented by salt), and spirit or air (represented by mercury). These three together in the right configuration could make anything. The Bible called it brimstone and had it fall from the sky like acid rain. Later descriptions of hell almost always mention the stink of sulphur fumes.

So many pigments from the chromiums to cadmium and mercury colours require sulphur, and a good number of them are deadly poisonous, but it’s the S3 molecule known as trisulfur that gets particularly interesting. Trisulfur is responsible for the extraordinary colours on Jupiter’s most beautiful moon Io, for the heavenly blues of the Lapis Lazuli pigment called ultramarine, and for the almost electrically vibrant (and controversially copyrighted) Yves Klein Blue. After the pretty pictures below, I have a small interview with Meghan who is an amazing geology-meets-textiles-meets-exploratory craft and fashion who hand delivered my package of Icelandic volcanic sulphur.

A three-headed monster in an alchemical flask, representing the composition of the alchemical philosopher's stone: salt, sulphur, and mercury. Watercolour painting by Salomon Trismosin

Bumble Bee Jasper a sedimentary rock matrix of volcanic ash–deep earth mud with sulphur layers

Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring — it seems that bacteria and heat are the main causes of colour here.

Indonesia’s Kawah Ijen volcano is famous for its blue flames and its one of the last places that sulphur is mined by hand.

Orpiment, or King's yellow, can be found on ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls. The chemical name for this pigment is arsenic sulfide. Totally poisonous and a bit stinky.

Io, or Jupiter I, is the innermost and third-largest of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter

The Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly

The S 3 molecule, known as trisulfur

The sulphur-crested cockatoo. And I know this is starting to feel like a Google image search but I had to include this guy because of this great New Yorker article. (photograph by Leila Jeffreys)

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A sulphur block (that stores sulphur extracted from tar sands to reduce the pollutants of the processed oil) waits here in Alberta for the price of sulphur to go up. Photograph by Gord McKenna

Lapis Lazuli from Afghanistan found in Neolithic burial sites, the funeral mask of Tutankhamon, and the pigments of the Renaissance masters’ depictions of the robes of the Virgin Mary. The intense blue is due to the trisulfur radical anion.

An interview with Meghan Price

Where does this sulphur come from?

I collected it from the lip of the Víti Crater in northeastern Iceland. The name means ‘hell’.

When was this sample found?

July 27, 2018

Can you describe the landscape?

This Víti Crater (there are 2), is an explosion crater that was formed in 1724 when a sudden burst of magma was ejected from just under the surface of the earth. The crater is about 300 meters across, kind of lima-bean shaped, and is filled with blue-green water. The perimeter rises steeply from the lake, and when I was there, one could walk around it on a muddy narrow path.

The landscape surrounding the crater is devoid of any sizeable vegetation, smooth, brown-grey in summer, and easily described as moon-like. There is a large geothermal plant nearby which billows vapour. It’s tidy network of geodesic domes and fat pipes is vast and totally delightful.

What role did this landscape play in your research/work/art?

My tour of Iceland preceded a one-month residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre where I was working on a digital jacquard loom. I was interested in experiencing an active geologic landscape – one that challenges the idea that rocks are static and dead. I ended up weaving a work called “Igneous” and employed heat and friction to transform the cloth.

Can you describe your mood and thoughts at the time?

While walking around the crater, I felt a bit scared of falling into it. I also felt like a tourist and distracted myself from that by imagining some sci-fi drama.

Are rocks and minerals a subject/object or collaborator in your process?

While I really like the idea of collaborating with rocks, I can’t claim to have had their consent. Subject and material would be more accurate descriptors.

Should humans be moving rocks and minerals around?

I’ll say yes, we should be moving rocks and minerals around as they are materials that we depend upon in daily life. At the same time, this ‘moving’ can have a devastating impact on ecologies and communities. It’s a question of scale.

Are there other memories embedded in this raw element that I should be aware of?

Sulphur sparks vague childhood memories of being intrigued and grossed out by its smell.

Can you describe your own work in a few sentences?

I work with lots of materials and processes but mostly textile related ones. I’ve made objects, prints, videos and workshops. Since 2014, these have been related to the cognitive challenge of deep time and our physical relationship with the earth.

Do you have any shows, events or work on line or out in the world that I could tell people about?

I’m super excited to be a part of a fall exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto called “Plastic Heart: Surface All The Way Through”. It was curated by the Synthetic Collective and is, in their words, “an experimental exhibition that examines plastic as art material, cultural object, geologic process, petrochemical product, and a synthetic substance fully entangled with the human body”.

https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/plastic-heart/

Any other thoughts you are having on colour, ink, alchemy, rocks or ink?

Colour is so powerful and fun to work with. For a long time, I worked almost exclusively in black and white. This was a way of emphasizing the relationship between threads and drawn lines, textile structures and drafting. More recently, I’ve been working with loads of colour. It is inherent to my materials which are largely synthetic and scavenged. With this, I’m thinking about colour and desire.