Nomadic Glow Projection

• 

  4 / 5

  Nomadic Glow Installation | 2015

Nomadic Glow | 2015 | Single Channel Video (7mins) | Fabric Sculpture Installation Laura Cooper’s project Nomadic Glow attempts to record—in a deliberately limited, schematic fashion—the elaborate naming system that nomadic herdsman use to identify each individual horse in their herd, which is based on their nuanced perception of horse coat colours. Nomadic Glow is the name of a shade of domestic wall paint. This blueish-white paint, when compared with Mongolian nomadic naming system for horse’s coat colours, is called ‘Tsenhker’ in Mongolian.When visiting the Mongolian Steppe, she brought with her a range of industrial paint colour chips and invited Hyesou—a local nomadic herdsman—to match the horses in his herd through this limited selection of paint colours. There are over 200 terms in Mongolian language specific to horses’ coat color; the language has fragmented and evolved so that each member of a large herd of horses can be identified primarily by colour and markings. This precision and the herders’ nuanced perception of colour are the result of the intimacy between man and animal and their bond within this specific landscape and way of life. The installation in the gallery is made up of video, sculpture, colour charts and text. The artist creates an intersection between two drastically different naming systems in her attempt to document and organize Hyseou’s herd into a colour chart. Video Links http://www.lauracooper.co.uk/index.php/project/nomadic-glow/