The Sound of Colour
Join Colour Designer Sarah Gottlieb as she talks to cultural and creative leaders about the most influential colours in their lives and work. Through insightful conversations you hear about the meaning and psychology of colours through the guest's personal story about their own creative work.
In each episode, we ask guests to talk about their passion for colour and where it comes from. We review a significant piece of our guest’s work where colour has played an important role, and also where they find inspiration – ending each episode with the musical element "the sound of a colour”.
Be prepared for laughter, tears and everything in between.
The Sound of Colour
Marie Herwald Hermann - When Colours Whisper and Shout
What happens when colours whisper rather than shout?
In this episode of The Sound of Colour, I meet Danish artist Marie Herwald Hermann, whose practice moves between quiet glazes and bursts of euphoric colour. For Marie, colour is never static - it swings like a pendulum between subtle whispers and joyful shouts, always in conversation with the colours around it.
Raised by architect parents in a home of white walls, and inspired by the rainbow rooms of Thorvaldsen’s Museum, Marie came to see that colour never exists alone: “It’s always a colour next to another colour - it’s the conversation between the two that I’m really interested in.” This philosophy runs through her practice, where variations in shade, texture, and finish create rich dialogues within seemingly simple forms.
In this episode we dive into how disappointment in the kiln can spark new ideas, how gloss and matte finishes shape the way spaces feel, and why the quietest, most ordinary objects sometimes have the most to say.
This is an episode about colour as energy. About finding beauty in what first appears uniform. And about why, sometimes, the quietest colours speak the loudest.
For more color inspiration follow @sarah__gottlieb and this episode's guest @m_t_hermann and the podcast musician @aloo_music
For updates on upcoming episodes follow @soundofcolour_podcast
This episode is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation.
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The Sound of Colour is produced and hosted by Sarah Gottlieb, with music by Matt Motte.
The host
Sarah Gottlieb is a Copenhagen-based designer and art director specialising in colour and spatial design. Known for transforming environments through innovative use of colour, she is dedicated to creating public spaces that inspire connection and a deeper appreciation for design.
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For images and information from each episode go to the Podcast website
Hi, you are listening to the Sound of Color, a podcast exploring how color shapes design, architecture and the way we experience the world.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I think it's a pure emotional reaction to it.
Sarah Gottlieb:There is never any strategy or theory behind my color approach to be honest, I'm your host, sarah Gottlieb, and I'm a designer and a color specialist. In each episode, I invite influential guests from the fields of design, art and architecture to talk about their work, their ideas and the role color plays in both. So, whether you're a designer, an architect or simply someone who just loves color, this podcast is for you.
Marie Herwald Hermann:there's always a disappointment when you open the kiln because you put an object in there and in your head it's the best fucking thing you've ever made and it's gonna be incredible. And then you open the kiln and there's always this element of oh this.
Sarah Gottlieb:This episode is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, helping bring more color, creativity and great conversations to life. Now let's get back to the episode. Hi Marie, Hi Sarah. The guest in this episode is ceramic artist Marie Herval-Hermann. I'm so happy to have you as a guest here on the Sound of Color podcast. Marie Herval-Hermann, I'm so happy to have you as a guest here on the Sound of Color podcast.
Sarah Gottlieb:Marie Hervel-Hermann is a Danish ceramic artist whose work explores the quiet poetry of everyday life. Her practice often revolves around still life and the domestic table, where vessels, objects and glazes become part of a larger narrative about memory, intimacy and time. Guided by a deep curiosity for how color, form and surface interact, Marie's pieces hover between sculpture and function, always inviting close attention and slow looking. Whether working on intimate hand-thrown vessels or large-scale installations, she sees ceramics as a way of shaping atmospheres, making spaces for reflection and connection. In this episode, we talk about how color can shift mood and memory, why the traces of touch matter in clay, and how literature and art history weave into her practice at the wheel. So let's dive into a conversation about material memory and the way color shapes the poetics of form with Marie.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Herval-Hermann, my relationship to color and my journey to color in my work has been a slow kind of journey in a way, and I think I often think about color as almost like a pendulum, oscillating between points, between quietness, like a whisper, and a fastness, like a shout, shouting, not in an aggressive way but more as a joyful, jubilant way. So for me there is these two ways of thinking of color. That is kind of linked and it's the whisper Sometimes I wanna whisper and sometimes I wanna shout, and sometimes I wanna run and kind of have a fast pace and sometimes I really want to slow down. And my relationship to color and the use of color is linked to whatever it is, I want to say, with the work and the body of work I'm working with.
Sarah Gottlieb:I like that. That's a new way of looking into it.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yeah, and so I think when I to your question, when started working, I should kind of go back and say my fascination with color right. I grew up in a house with both my parents were architects, so it was a house with white walls, but very specific white walls, and then color some color right, but always like a Limfao God, I don't even know the English word for that. Oh yeah, is that like a? It's like a pigment, right, that you paint with, so not a flat paint.
Sarah Gottlieb:No, no, it's like a pigment that you mix with this kind of glue-ish substance, exactly right, so that it's a Very technical explanation.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Maybe I'll look it up and figure it out, yeah, but so that the color wouldn't we're always alive, right, it's not a flat color and very specific color. And then I remember as a kid going to Tollwelsen's Museum and just being In Copenhagen, in Copenhagen, yeah, where I grew up, and just kind of being completely fascinated with the inside of this museum. Right, it's small rooms with different colors, every room, right, and it's kind of Quite intense and vibrant and living color Again, like pigment colors.
Sarah Gottlieb:that's so such an experience to be in.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Absolutely, but they are always in relation to another color. They're never a color on their own. So you stand in the green room, but you can an intense, dark, foresty green. But you're looking into the next room, that's a blue, right, that's a sky blue, and then you can see the red room afterwards, right? So there are always conversations between colors and I think that has formed the way I think of color, because it's never a color. It's always a color next to another color, so they're always multiples, because it's the conversation between the two that I'm really interested in.
Sarah Gottlieb:Um, but then I how did color then come into your ceramic work?
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yeah, so I started with these very what I would say kind of quiet colors, so kind of a pale blue. That's kind of a specific Chinese glaze from the Song Dynasty 1200 called the Celadon glaze, and it's almost like an icy blue, very quiet, and that started. And then kind of these grayish pink came in, almost like a when you blush Right. So they are there, but very quiet. So I think it was. It's a way of kind of slowly whispering.
Sofie Søe:Yeah.
Marie Herwald Hermann:And that's kind of… Like learning to talk almost Exactly and that kind of then developed and became, you know, brighter colours and… but then again, like this kind of pendulum, then I have times where they become very bright and kind of contrasty, and then there's times where again it kind of almost disappears. I've just finished a body of work that were kind of based on drywall compound what a sexy term can you just take it.
Sarah Gottlieb:Take us through what is drywall compound it's a material.
Marie Herwald Hermann:So when you build a house or room, you make it, make a structure, and then you put sheets of drywall up and then, when two sheets meet each other, you want to hide the seam, yeah. So you use this kind of it's almost like a plaster, yeah, and you kind of put it on and then you sand it down and then it feels like a continuous wall with no cracks. Yeah, one long surface, exactly. And then, of course, when it's dry, you prime it and then you put paint on right and you color the wall.
Marie Herwald Hermann:So this drywall compound, which is like a warm cream, yellowish color, not specifically nice, not ugly, but I was interested in this non-color, a color that's never meant to be seen, because it's always meant to be painted on and hidden, and this body of work I was making this past six months, when I was in Chicago and there was so much shouting in the world and specifically in America, right, and I just I wanted to whisper and I almost wanted to kind of have everyone just slow down and just pay attention to each other, yeah, and I think that's how I chose this color.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yeah, because it felt like a color that was just so quiet and never meant to be seen. So I painted the walls in the gallery in this color and all the objects were that color, so they almost disappear within themselves. But when you slow down you start to see the variations in the objects that are placed there. And that slowing down I'm really interested in that. When you make an object with, let's say, seven components on it, which is how my work often is it's always objects in relationship to each other.
Sofie Søe:Yeah.
Marie Herwald Hermann:And they all may appear white as you look at them kind of first, but then when you slow down and you look suddenly as time becomes still, the colors kind of almost become stranger. No, not stranger, but the colors almost become further and further away from each other and you start to notice a warm white or yellowish or bluish white or a matte surface or a shiny surface.
Sarah Gottlieb:So it's almost like the object becomes louder when you becomes quieter I love how marie invites us to slow down, to be still enough, to notice the subtle shifts and quiet nuances of color. That speaks straight to my color nerd heart. Now let's hear what color she chooses for my experiment. The sound of a color. So I've asked you to choose a color.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Marie yeah.
Sarah Gottlieb:And what color have you chosen to hear the sound of?
Marie Herwald Hermann:I thought a lot about that and there was many variations and possibilities, lot about that and there was many variations and possibilities, but I think I came up with a color that is somewhere in between a brown, a gray and a green. A brown, a green and green, yes. So, if you can, if you take an avocado, yeah, and you open it up, yeah, and you leave it for a few hours and it starts to get that brown, yeah, so it's there. It's like a grayish, greenish brown, and for me, that color is almost a transition color because I associate it with it becoming something else. It's both really beautiful, but there is also a little bit of like an embarrassment or something about it Like something getting ruined.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yeah, so it's not decay, it is decay. It's not death, but it's transitioning. And I'm really I've been fascinated and loving that color for a long time because the minute you put a pink or blue next to it, the blue and the pink just become so much more beautiful. Yeah, because of that.
Sarah Gottlieb:Have you created a glaze that has that green color?
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yeah.
Sarah Gottlieb:Do you have one a sample? I have one a sample, I have one.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I have an image of one, yes, here, oh yeah, and it's this kind of color and I don't have a sample here.
Sarah Gottlieb:And this just which we're pointing at some like print proofs from a book, and this is from the exhibition. Is that from the walls of, from the, the sound, the walls of?
Marie Herwald Hermann:helping out with the title. And the walls became the world all around.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, and the walls became the world all around yeah, and it's this color, yeah, which is the color on the wall next to this, not an eaves blue, but like close, close, like a bit more, not so bright, but dark, intense blue. Yeah, yeah, I can see what you mean with the avocado going bad, right, yeah, wow, I want to. You know, I think you already kind of painted quite a nice picture, but, uh, you know, if we go with the thought that the color affects us on all our senses, what, what experience?
Marie Herwald Hermann:would feel like this color. I think there's a melancholic feeling to it. It's, it's a, it's maybe little sad, but there's also a depth to it. So it's not as scary, it's not like a blood red, it's not a color that's aggressive. It's quite quiet, maybe quietly sad, quietly sad, which makes it sound a little pathetic. But it's not. It's quite comfortable in its own skin.
Sarah Gottlieb:I actually that's, I think, because when I look at it as well, it's not like an excuse for itself. No, it's comfortable with being quietly sad, yeah, a little bit depressed, and I'm okay with it, that's okay. Ah, I think that's maybe also a lot to do with the world that we live in at the moment.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Exactly, acceptance Acceptance, but also frustration to do something, and there is hope in it, maybe because I think of it next to something else. I'm like, ooh, yeah, that next to this. And then there's like, oh, all these images come into my head.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, okay, that's fine. Okay, but then I think that's quite a string. I'm going to look forward to what our musician Sophie is going to do with this one. Yeah, I'm sure she'll wrap her musical brain around this. A shade somewhere between grey, green and brown, basically the color of an avocado past its prime. I'm curious how Sophie will interpret that color.
Sofie Søe:Hi Sophie, hi Sarah.
Sarah Gottlieb:For this season of the Sound of Color, I'm thrilled to be collaborating with musician and producer Sophie Sø, the artist behind the experimental electro pop project ALU, blending synthesizers, drum machines and cinematic strings with her powerful yet sensitive vocals. Alu has gained international attention for her emotional depth and sonic detail. With a background in mathematics, computer science, sound engineering and music, sophie brings a uniquely analytical and intuitive approach to sound. She'll be creating a musical interpretation of each guest's chosen color throughout season two, and I can't wait for you to hear what color sounds like. Now let's get back to the episode. We're back. Yeah, I'm excited Me too. Let's create the sound of a color. Damn Damn, that's amazing.
Sarah Gottlieb:Okay, well, sophie, in this episode I meet up with an artist, marie Hervel-Hermann.
Sarah Gottlieb:She's a sculptor, a ceramicist, and she's really known for like her installation work and I would say like she has this kind of poetic use of color, material and foam and she kind of works with evoking, like memory and also like the quiet beauty of everyday spaces.
Sarah Gottlieb:So when I asked her what color she wanted to hear the sound of, she chose green, but a green that she's used in her exhibition, and the walls became the world all around us, which is the exhibition that we speak a lot about in the podcast. Um, but this green it's like, uh, it's like she said, it's like an avocado that's been cut up open and then left lying around for a few hours so it's kind of turned brown. So we kind of ended up saying that it's a grayish, brownish green and, as she described it, a bit sad, but okay with being sad kind of color, cool, not like depressed and all like oh, I'm feeling sad for myself, more like I'm sad and that's okay. It's this green. Wow, there's some avocado behind it, but it's like the, the sad kind of avocado yeah, it's very like it's almost not green anymore.
Sofie Søe:It's like almost like a stone kind of mossy yeah I think, also.
Sarah Gottlieb:That's why we ended up on the grayish, brownish, yeah, greenish wow yeah, totally yeah, uh, but she's, yeah, she also quite liked the color because she said like it's the kind of color that, as she said, on its own it's kind of a bit sad, but it's when you put it next to other colors. It's kind of um livens them up a bit, so like a pink becomes more alive next to this. Yeah, sad color, oh, I like that. So, uh, what's your initial reaction to the color?
Sofie Søe:it's, um, it's, it's kind of beautiful in its own way. Um, not a color I would usually think was beautiful. If I just saw it like I. You know how it's annoying it is to have to scrape off that layer of the avocado when you want the green one. But when I see it like this, it it's, uh, it's pretty. And especially you showed me like next to a blue and the blue really pops with this avocado green beside it, and so I'm thinking very like, um, it's almost like a background color, like it doesn't really it's not a lead kind of color, it's not a lead.
Sofie Søe:No it, it doesn't want to take up space. It's like it's okay with being a bit in the background and like I don't know if you can say, catalyzing another cut like you're, like you're making another, uh, exaggerating other colors.
Sarah Gottlieb:Actually just being this nice supportive, uh, lick for the others okay, so if we go, if we take this into the musical realm, uh, you know, like you know, you need to create a piece of music here. You need to create the sound of grayish, brownish, green, sophie, that's your job. And how do you? Do you have any thoughts on like with the looking at this color? Do you have any ideas popping into your mind?
Sofie Søe:mind. Yeah, like I would. I would probably try and use some of the same like adjectives on my piece, as on my creative journey, as as on the color, like how can I make a track that feels balanced and calm and at peace and a little bit in the background, like not taking up too much space but just being there like serving for other elements to, to be like carried up somehow. So it should be a a nice background kind of piece without, yeah, without a lead, like I don't think there will be a butterfly or some super joyful lead on top of this. It's going to be a bit melancholic too and nostalgic, maybe like a piece of wood or some decayed avocado that sounds good.
Sarah Gottlieb:I think I'm gonna look forward to talking to you again when you've been working with that in the studio Me too, and then we're gonna hear your version of grayish, brownish, green. So see you soon, see you soon. We now return to Marie Hervel-Hermann, as she takes us into her work. The Walls Became the World Around Us, a piece where space, colour and form unfold into something almost immersive.
Marie Herwald Hermann:It was in a relatively big space where all the walls were painted in different colours, very bright colours.
Sarah Gottlieb:Almost a bit like Thorvaldsen, I would say Exactly.
Marie Herwald Hermann:and it is exactly drawn on the colours from Thorvaldsen's museum. On the walls were different ceramic objects, shelf objects and some carved wood and some silicone, and in the middle of the space there was a long table with some colorful bowls, almost like what you would have a you would serve a dish in, and there was a hundred of those.
Sarah Gottlieb:So it was also just for me to explain to this almost a quite straight up big bowls, big bowls exactly Just like a surrounding, like what? Do you call it Like what's it?
Marie Herwald Hermann:turned yeah, thrown yeah, yeah, exactly and then they had two color on the inside and a color on the outside. Okay, different ones. So duality, yeah, and this show I was working on during the pandemic, yeah, and I was living in chicago with my family and Chicago closed down for almost a year, so your house, in your domestic space, became your office and the kids school, because they had to do online schooling for a year, and it was the dance floor. It was everything suddenly, because that was where you were and had to do everything, because we, the movement was restriction of movement.
Marie Herwald Hermann:So all of a sudden, the world is very small, exactly, and the title and the walls became the world all around comes from a children's book, a Moorish Sendak, called when the Wild Things Are, that I've always loved and it's about this kid that kind of gets sent to his room and suddenly he starts to imagining this whole world and he goes and visits you know the wild things, and so it kind of that got stuck in my head, like what happens when suddenly this space that we often think of as the quiet space or kind of where we slow down, right, we're out in the world and everything is happening and then we come home and we breathe right relaxation, exactly, and suddenly everything outside was so quiet and I just wanted to shout. It was like I needed life, like I needed colors, and and I started to think about like okay, where, what, what do I remember about colors and joy?
Marie Herwald Hermann:and it was Thorvaldsen's museum yeah so I based all the colors of that. I didn't want to match them exactly, because they. I wanted it to be my memory of it. Yeah, um, and then. So all the walls were kind of there was a brown and a yellow and a red and a blue and a pink, so kind of references, referencing that space and the objects were kind of in conversation with that.
Sarah Gottlieb:And then the dark avocado, going Exactly.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Slightly sad, but then, next to a pink, that made it quite cheerful, yeah, and then this table with all these bowls in the middle. That was kind of a way of thinking also of like what was I missing? I was missing people. Yeah Right, not just friends and family, but I've always loved being, you know, on a train in rush hours and you're just packed in to people you don't know and in one way you completely disappear. And in the other way there's this energy that we all get from being close to each other. And I love cities, I love living in big cities because of that, because of that duality of disappearing and being part of something at the same time. So that exhibition was so much about that missing life, missing joy and ugliness and chaotic things, because the world was so quiet suddenly.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yes, suddenly the world grew quiet. But Marie's beautiful colors are anything but they spark curiosity and I'm eager to hear how she works with color in her ceramic pieces.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I think it's a pure emotional reaction to it. There is never any strategy or theory behind my color approach. To be honest, I make a lot of tests. Always we're sitting here on a table yeah looking at lots of kind of lots of color tests and so nice, and again I need to. The thing with clay is that you cannot see the color until you fired, fired the glaze or the clay.
Marie Herwald Hermann:So, even though it's like an emotional reaction to the color and the way that I work with it, I need to have a formula for every glaze or every color beforehand, because I can't see it when I'm working with it, I have to wait until it's dried and been fired. So there is like a strange delay in the way that the object, the three-dimensional objects, are made and look and then color gets applied, right, because you apply the glaze weeks later. So there is like kind of this weird kind of time warp, right, where you can imagining it in my head, right, but I'm also not completely sure, and there are the possibilities of a million options or a million variations, and because I, you know, one day I'm like, oh yeah, yellows, yes, and then the next day I'm like, oh no, like let's go back to the dark blue. So there is sometimes back and forwards.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, do you also? Do you experience that, when you work with it, that you kind of have like a shape and an object and then you kind of imagine something and you go through the process of creating the shape and the object, letting it dry, glazing it, firing it up, and then you're like, and then it comes out and you're disappointed oh, so often what do you do then? What do you do when, like, the disappointment hits you?
Marie Herwald Hermann:sometimes I try to re-glaze it you can do that, yeah and sometimes I just have to leave it behind and I think, leave it behind, as in, like leave it, or like take it in, or like do you work with?
Sarah Gottlieb:like you know? I'm thinking that you work with the mistakes of color and the mistake of a process, or like how is your working process?
Marie Herwald Hermann:in that way. Often I'll keep the object and it may reappear at a later time. I'm like, oh yeah, that color, now I want to use that. Mmm. Sometimes I have to break it up just to kind of get it out, and sometimes it's a happy surprise but you're like, ah, I didn't think of that, you know, yeah, but I think when you work with clay and I've done that for so many years that disappointment is such a big part of the process, because there's so much that's left that's out of my hands to the kiln, and when you fire things and things go wrong because I didn't make them properly or I was rushing, but there's also other things that can happen. So I think disappointment is such a you kind of. You get quite good at dealing with it.
Sarah Gottlieb:And I mean you get quite good at dealing with disappointment. That is like accepting being a bit sad and depressed, exactly like the green. This is like the college. This is like I feel like I'm at some sort of like a therapy session here. You're like teaching me about life. This is how it is, and I'm quite a cheerful person.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yes, you are that true? But it's so funny that the British artist Grayson Perry who also works with ceramics among many other things, but I think he describes it so well he said there's always a disappointment when you open the kiln, Because you put an object in there and in your head it's the best fucking thing you've ever made and it's gonna be incredible. And then you open the kiln and there's always this element of oh okay, and then you leave it for a few days and you come back and often you're like yeah, okay or not, but but I think because those few days that the object is being fired in your head, you're like God. I think this is it.
Sarah Gottlieb:This is such a good piece. There's always that moment of disappointment when you open the kiln, but maybe it's simply different from what you imagined. That thought will stay with me. Different from what you imagined. That thought will stay with me. And now I'd love to hear how Marie works with color in relation to light and space.
Marie Herwald Hermann:The first way that I think about color is this pendulum right, swinging between shouting and quietness or whispering, right and the walls became. The world all around was like fast in terms of tempo, with the colors and loud, in that kind of joyful way.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Because of being the opposite of how the world around you were at that time, yeah, and even when you just entered the space, it was like color and thing and you kind of there was an energy there and you felt kind of surrounded by life. And then this other exhibition is kind of the other end of the pendulum, right, when it's almost so quiet.
Sarah Gottlieb:it's a whisper that's almost hidden and can you just also yeah, this exhibition is it actually, is it has it finished. It just finished in new york, yeah it just finished and just to describe the space for the business, it kind of if we walk into the exhibition. How would you experience it?
Marie Herwald Hermann:So you walk into a room and all the walls are painted in this colour of drywall compound, which is a material that you use to, kind of, when you build a room, and you put drywall sheets up and you use this kind of plaster compound to seal the cracks or whatever gaps there is between sheets and then you paint over it. So it's a color that's never meant to be seen and it's a yellowish cream color, a color that's not specifically nice, but it's also not ugly. It's quite neutral in a weird way.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah. But I would say also, for me it's like when I looked, you know, when I didn't go to New York, unfortunately, but I looked at the images, I would say it's a kind of a yellow which is a bit like organic dairy farm cream, you know. So in that way, if you kind of go that direction, it's like, yeah, it's quite kind of nice quality, quiet, quality of luxury. Yeah, cream, cream.
Marie Herwald Hermann:But I can also see that it's a bit bland as well, exactly, and I think. And then half half the room, so up until your kind of your hip, was a high gloss version of the color, and and from and from your hip and upwards were a matte. And I often work with high gloss paint and matte glaze matte paint because of this interest that I have in that there is a difference and you can notice it. There is a difference, and you can notice it, depending on where your body is in the space, so depending on how the lights hit the wall and where your head is. So from one ankle it just looks one color and then maybe you shift a little bit and then you see the reflection and you see that the bottom half of the wall kind of reflects back at you.
Marie Herwald Hermann:So this kind of dependence on where you are in space and looking at the work I'm really interested in and using color in that way as well, so that a space will change depending on how you move around it. So that was kind of your. That was how you met the room. Then there were six shelf pieces, ceramic shelf pieces, glazed in the same creamy color, with objects on top of them and these objects I've worked for many years with the kind of what I think of as the unspectacular object. Can you describe a little bit more?
Sofie Søe:like the unspectacular.
Marie Herwald Hermann:So I'm really. What fascinates me, I think, is the life we have in a domestic space with objects in our daily life and how we move around our space with objects in our daily life and how we move around our space with objects, and sometimes three objects are placed next to each other by accident right, it's a cup, it's your iPhone charger and it's a piece of paper. Right, and they become like a still life of what is going on with you, right that moment. And then it moves on.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yeah, as you move on and things around and you know exactly right. So it's almost like a dance or choreography you have with these objects, and I choose to kind of take out one moment and make it into an to a small sculpture as a still life, so that there's often a couple of different objects. Some of them are vessels, so you will immediately read them as something that belongs in a kitchen. You know, you may not know exactly what it is, but you read it as, oh, it's a cup-ish, bowl-ish thing, thing. And then there are objects that are kind of a lumpy and almost as if you could isolate the moment you touch something. So it's all about that.
Marie Herwald Hermann:And then there's objects that are these objects that change shape right, a charger, a piece of paper, our keys, these objects that we always have with us but that are constantly kind of it's not exactly, it's not a shape, it's kind of multiple shapes at the same time. So they there was four of them on the wall and then there was a long wooden stick, a two meter long wooden stick that I carved, had carved and then on, and that was kind of hanging between a pillar in the space and the wall, and there were a long strip of silicone that was kind of draped over it, a silicone that I cast a lot in silicone and.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I color it, so it was a pinkish color.
Sarah Gottlieb:And do you say, when you say you cast a lot in silicone, do you mean like when you're making the ceramic piece you're making a silicone cast, or you mean more like as in? Like I create pieces in, yeah, yeah, I, so I often yeah absolutely so.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I cast big sheets of silicone and then I cut them up and use them almost as a cloth over things. Silicone, for me, is a material that I've been fascinated with for a long time, both because of the relationship it has to the domestic right it's silicone molds and it was meant to be this wonder material but it's also the female body and it's female body ideals and kind of unrealistic expectations. So often I color it pink to kind of make a connection to the body.
Sarah Gottlieb:Also, I would say silicone has like a skin, like textural experience to it.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Exactly, and it's so appealing and you so want to touch it and at the same time there's something about it that's just a little dead and pushes you back.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, when you look at Marie's works, you can sense how she's been working with an incredible range of nuances within the same color, and I'd love to hear what her thoughts are on that.
Marie Herwald Hermann:The objects in the compound and bridges were seems to be the same color when you first look at it, right, and when you look at an object where you have five objects and they are all whitish, right, you kind of register as that. But as you slow down to look at it, they become more and more alive and you start to notice the difference in the variations of color, and one becomes more yellow, one becomes more blue, so there is a loudness almost happening within the objects as you slow down. And I think there is something about your body in a space when you're looking at work or looking at anything. It's the same if we stand in front of a brick wall, right, if I slow down and really stare at it, I can see all the different colors of the bricks and and I can tell you where it's been maybe fired a little higher and that the brown is a little more dark, or here it's a little light, but we don't notice that when we just bicycle past, because that's also part of life, right, sometimes we need to move fast and sometimes we can slow down, and I think for me the relationship to space and color is that that in a space with lots of color.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I can move fast, and I don't mean this as not paying attention. I think we can move fast and we can almost like when you're at a concert and you can feel the base in your body. You can do that when you're in a colorful room with lots of colors right, it's fast-pasting and you go from your eyes, move from one color to the next, to the next, to the next, right. So there is an energy and we need that sometimes. I need that sometimes. But there's also times where I need to really slow down and I think some of the pieces that's what I'm trying to kind of get that they become loud when you slow down, even though there are a variation of the same color.
Sarah Gottlieb:What Marie describes makes color feel like an extra material in its own right, and for her it's never limited to the surface of a piece.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Color always extends into the space around it. The space is always something I think about when I start a new body of work. My work is relatively small, yeah, right, it's. A lot of the objects are the scale that fits into a domestic hand right, a domestic space, a kitchen or something, but I never want them to feel fragile. I've never been interested in the conversation around fragility because I don't think of it as a fragile moment, right? So in a way, the the walls, the colored walls.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I started to use kind of colored walls as a almost like a protective shield around the objects so that they don't feel lost, right, often we think of a gallery space and it's these white walls and it is this quite hard non-color, right, in a way it's not a white, I mean, there's like a non-space, right, in a way it's not a white, I mean there's Like a non-space, exactly where we are meant to ignore it. Yeah, so the walls are a color that we don't think about them, right, but of course they're there and I want to think about them Because I don't think my work exists without them. Yeah, so that's how the kind of the painted walls comes in, and sometimes they've been very colorful walls. I've done a show where it's just white walls, but with stripes vertically. That's high gloss. So almost like a circus, an invisible circus.
Sarah Gottlieb:I like that an invisible circus.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I like that an invisible circus yeah, so when you again, when you stand close to the wall, you can totally see all the stripes, yeah, but if you're in the middle of the room it just looks white. So there's like so many different ways of working with color for me seems like it's very much about the duality of color.
Sofie Søe:Yeah, absolutely, and the shift between that duality.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, seeing it and not seeing it.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Absolutely, and sometimes you reveal something and sometimes you hide something, and I think again coming back to the relationship between madness and glass is something that I use in the ceramic objects as well.
Sarah Gottlieb:Sometimes I choose to color the porcelain that I work in so that the color is is solid, and sometimes I use it as a glaze, so it's like a shield yeah, and when you say solid, you mean like putting the color into the actual, exactly into the clay, like yeah, yeah, I'm doing like needing fingers, finger meeting fingers, but exactly, yeah, I'm well with the other. You're mentioning is like you have to you have the ceramic piece and then you apply the color in the glaze exactly mmm.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Then sometimes like these, which, of course, people can't see on the radio, but they are a color test, and this is a porcelain that has pigments in it. Yeah, so it has a beautiful color, but it's not shiny, right, it's just the clay.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, the matte ceramic feel yeah.
Marie Herwald Hermann:And sometimes I want them to have this madness it's a matte ceramic feel, yeah and sometimes I want them to have this matte-ness, and sometimes I want them to be shiny and kind of reflect back at you. Then you can almost see your own reflection in it, and that for me is also a way of working with color.
Sarah Gottlieb:I'm doing some. Yeah, I'm looking at the colors here. So these ones, we're looking at these small round tests. So with these ones I'm having here, I have these two matte ones. So that is like but is this a glaze as well, would you say.
Marie Herwald Hermann:No, that's a colored porcelain.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, and then that's why you get this like really matte, tactile kind of feel of the color. And then you have this I have these two blues, and then I have this kind of feel of the color. And then you have this I have this, these two blues, and then I have this kind of really shiny, pale, pale pink and that's a shiny glaze on top of the material, so it almost kind of separates itself from the object in a way.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Yeah, and it's. I mean here it's three whites, right and semi matte, and one is high gloss and one is completely matte, because it's just the color of the clay, and and for me these are three different colors- mmm right, they're all made with tin oxide, they're all white yeah but because the way the light hits them they could become completely different.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Right, and if you have them next to each other, you they seem like two different colors yeah and I'm really I like exploring that part of color yeah again, as you said, you know that you reveal something and sometimes you hide something, and sometimes you you have to pay, you have to slow down to see it and sometimes you may just doubt if it's your eyesight. Yeah, right if it's really there exactly. Is it just because the light is hitting that object differently?
Sarah Gottlieb:is that why it seems slightly more cold, or yeah, sometimes you need to slow down to truly see A reminder worth holding on to, because it's both true and deeply inspiring. And speaking of inspiration, where does Marie find hers? I asked her to bring along something that holds meaning for her.
Marie Herwald Hermann:I brought a bowl in and it's a small bowl. It's Chinese, it's from the Sun dynasty, so it's from 1200. Wow around that. Yeah, it's glazed in a celadon glaze, so it has like a greenish, bluish, light color. Yeah, the rim is ungzed, so that's the color of the porcelain.
Sofie Søe:Yeah.
Marie Herwald Hermann:The Chinese during the Sun Dynasty were the ones who invented porcelain, and then it took Europe hundreds of years to figure out how to copy them. But I think this bowl is for me it's a beautiful bowl, I think. Very simple bowl. Again, it's not. When it was made, it was nothing spectacular, right.
Marie Herwald Hermann:But once you start to kind of again really look, there is lots of oranges, yeah, orange flashes, there is iron speckles. So suddenly amongst this kind of icy blue, there is like a dark brown dot, there's like a warmness, and certain places there's a coldness to the color. So I think for me it is again that thing that there's so much going on in it at the same time as there's also I can also just look at it and see a super simple ball. Yeah, and I, and that's okay, yeah, because I think for me it's never about kind of oh, we have to pay attention, because because we don't always have to pay attention and we can't always pay attention not to life, not to color, but sometimes we can, and when we can, it's quite amazing what we discover and what color suddenly re-emerges from things that we have overlooked wow, I think that's like it really sums up.
Sarah Gottlieb:I think sums up your like way of looking at the world and I can really reflect it in your work. It makes a lot of sense, you know, like when I'm like looking now handling this uh little ball, it's true, it's like kind of like. It's a bit like it's a ball. Yeah, there you go. But then again, as you slow down and really pay attention, that's lots of little details, that's super beautiful or funny, or yeah, or quirky, yeah. And then then you can also be like I just need my breakfast.
Marie Herwald Hermann:Here's a bowl, exactly and for me, that is color and that's my relationship to color and it's the relationship I think most of us have to life. Right, we, we can't hopefully we don't do either all the time. Right, yeah, it's the balance between the both. Yeah, the pendulum swinging.
Sarah Gottlieb:I think this is. You've summed it up completely. You're the perfect. You have written the manuscript. I think this is the perfect place to finish the conversation. Thank you so much, sarah. This was so lovely to talk to you.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah, I think I want to. Just I want to really say thank you as well for this inspiring conversation. It was really good, it was lovely to talk to you about your work and your love of color, and thank you to everybody who listened. I just want to say this only now we can move on and see what, or hear what, the musician came up with. Oh, yes, for the sad, but okay with being sad darkish green color. Thank you, a big, big thank you to Marie for her inspiring thoughts. And now back to Sophie and how she has interpreted grayish, brownish, green.
Sofie Søe:Hi Sophie, I'm back. Hey, sarah.
Sarah Gottlieb:You've been working on interpreting the color grayish, brownish, green, the little bit sad color, but okay with being sad color. Yeah, and I'm quite excited to hear your musical take on this color, and do you want to tell us a bit about?
Sofie Søe:the process of creating it. Yeah, I immediately, when I saw the color, went to the studio and, just like I didn't think too much about what I was doing, I just let it happen as it went, because I had these colors and the associations so strong in mind. And I realized first I was like creating the sound of the, of the evocative, before it was decaying like this bright green, beautiful color. It's the first one you can hear in the track and then you hear it's decay, like how it's like a little bit like yeah, nostalgic, like melancholic, like going into this, like okay, here I am and just okay with being there. But we can also hear this little like the, the, the person that's still inside, like the, the core of the avocado you know, like there's still some light green inside.
Sofie Søe:It hasn't like died, like, so we can still hear that coming in, sometimes like it's not totally sad on the inside it has a sparkle yeah, yeah, it still has a positive like, like a little glimpse of its youth all green?
Sarah Gottlieb:yeah, and how? Did you have any struggles along the way composing it?
Sofie Søe:um, I kind of did, uh, I like I created it. And then I was like, yep, this is it. And then I listened back and then I was like, oh, there are some resonances like some frequencies that are like, uh, bothering me, because I didn't spend a lot of time mixing it. Um, and then I was like, okay, I'm going to go to the studio and try and just like remove these like the harsh things about this, because I wanted to be so soothing and calm. And yeah, while I was in the studio, I was like, okay, yeah, I'll remove this and this. And then, oh, I could hear something else started to pop up and I was like, oh'll remove this and this.
Sofie Søe:And then, oh, I could hear something else started to pop up and I was like, oh, now this is a problem, I'm gonna deal with that. What if I do this? And okay, no, I'm just gonna turn this down. Then another element, starting being loud, because, like, I just turned down what it played against, ah, yeah, yeah. And then I was like, okay, so I'll just turn this a bit down, and then whatever that was playing against, you know, because things are coming kind of in and out in this track and they're all like playing together.
Sofie Søe:So every time you turn something down, something else was like out of balance yeah, exactly, and the whole point with this track was to create like a balance and also not to have a lead like like it's supposed to be just one background like. So we can't like have something like standing very much in front and being like here I am, I'm like the dancing lead of this track, like, and I think, uh, usually when I mix, I I'm thinking about, okay, what element in this track does like needs the attention, like what is it people listen for? And then I want to, of course, make sure you can hear that as the main element somehow, often in a pop song would be the vocals or, you know, it could be the guitar in a very rock track or something like that. But here it's consisting of five elements only and none of them should actually have the big role. They should all just balance with each other and be a bit sad.
Sarah Gottlieb:Being okay with being sad.
Sofie Søe:Yeah, I think most of them are like like, I can tell you what elements are in there if you want to hear yeah, there's the bright green, yeah, the first one we hear.
Sofie Søe:Then some like dusty, earthy for me, strings come in, um, and then. Or like first the bass and then the strings, um, and the bass is like for me the decay, um, yeah, and then there's some a very, a high note like that I actually just put in there to balance the low, like the keying parts, just like I wanted it to not just be dark. It has to be okay with being sad.
Sarah Gottlieb:Yeah exactly.
Sofie Søe:It has still. It has, yeah, a positivity inside, I think.
Sarah Gottlieb:I'm going to. Okay. I just want to say now, I think we should listen to. I'm okay with that. No, I think we should listen to. I'm okay with that. No, um, I think we should listen to the piece of music. So let's ask the listeners to put their headphones on, turn up the volume, get comfortable, close your eyes, because here comes the sound of grayish, brownish, green.
Sofie Søe:The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the the.
Sarah Gottlieb:Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who loves collars and design just as much as you do. Hopefully they will enjoy it as well. If you'd like to see more about Marie Hervel-Hermann's work, head over to my website, sarahgodliebdk, under the podcast section. This episode was made possible with the support from the Danish Arts Foundation. Thanks again for listening and see you next time on the Sound of Color.
