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Materialising Colour: Journeys with Giulio Ridolfo, 2020
Jane was commissioned by innovative Danish textile design company Kvadrat to produce a book about the work of master Italian colourist Giulio Ridolfo. In a 21st century world in which the limitless possibilities of digital colour and colour systems have produced a bland and anonymous colour environment, Ridolfo calls for us to reconnect with the material origins of colour and to reinvest it with emotional power and cultural meaning. We developed the book’s concept with Ridolfo - documenting a series of working journeys through the places that inspire him and recording the alchemical creative processes by which he extracts colour from his surroundings and uses this to develop a new palette for a fabric or a product. Alongside texts by Jane, essays by Aditi Rangan, Elena Commessatti and Anniina Koivu elucidate Ridolfo’s approach.
The book concludes with a highly personal lexicon of colours that gives a sense of the vast range of influences that Ridolfo draws upon to inform his creative process from botany to pop culture, psychology, fashion, physics and geology.
Edited by Jane Withers; Photography by Howard Sooley; Design by John Morgan
Created in collaboration with Kvadrat
Published by Phaidon