John Parker - RED

Artist's Statement
For Auckland Theatre Company, I designed the play RED about Mark Rothko and the Seagram Murals, by playwright John Logan. There is a moment when Rothko is questioning his assistant Ken about a blanket use of the word "red."

 "You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magenta-burgundy-salmon-carmine-carnelian-coral? Anything but "red!" What is RED?!"

Working so closely with the text during the design process set me off on a quest of what RED actually meant to me. I have played around with the colour on and off since 1973, mostly with low-fire Cadmium-Selenium glazes. New materials have made these latest high fired red pieces possible.

Since 1992 my work has been almost exclusively in white and with clusters of pieces. But with red the same rules don't necessarily apply.

The colour works very differently to white and dictates its own different spatial relationships and groupings."