The Pigment LAB- Memory in Color

(2024–ongoing, research archive + material studies)

The Pigment Lab: Memory in Color is a research archive where material experimentation, cultural memory, and thematic inquiry intersect. By reviving pigments such as Lapis Lazuli, Naples Yellow, and Indigo, Sieva Smith investigates how color functions as both material and metaphor — a carrier of history, resilience, and dialogue across communities. The Lab serves as a foundation for exhibitions, writing, and public programs, linking private craft with collective memory.

Community / Institutional Relevance:
The Pigment Lab serves as the foundation for Smith’s exhibitions, writing, and public programs, linking research and studio practice with community engagement. By framing color as cultural archive, the project invites audiences to consider how pigment embodies both loss and endurance, bridging private craft with collective memory.

Cultural Color Studies

Each pigment carries both a history and a symbolic role. In these studies, swatches become reference points that connect technical qualities with conceptual meaning: Lapis as presence, Indigo as erasure, Naples Yellow as permanence. Through mixing, glazing, and layering, Smith examines how each color holds light and space. These explorations build a symbolic palette that informs larger paintings and installations, grounding artistic practice in rigor, documentation, and cultural resonance.

Field Notes

Thematic research begins with ideas of presence, erasure, fragility, and permanence. These concepts are developed in notebooks and writing before being tested materially on the surface. The notebooks act as both record and dialogue and a place where ideas translate into color, and where process connects research to lived experience. In this way, the Lab becomes a site of conversation between material and memory.

Living Archives

The Pigment Lab is an evolving archive of pigment-based research that expands into exhibitions, writing, and public engagement. Each study, whether a swatch, a fragment, or a glazing experiment, contributes to a cumulative framework that extends beyond the studio. By positioning pigment as both witness and dialogue, the archive invites communities to consider color as a lens into resilience and transformation.