Indigo (January)

The business of living with the sky takes a lifetime. Or a moment. The ancients spent lifetimes extracting indigo, for a moment’s grace. An indigo-dyed kimono (‘Blue: Alchemy of a Colour’, NGV January 2016) covers the body with sky. Or sea. Live with it. Light-blue for a young woman, dark-blue for an older woman. Summer streams and cloud flowers. The moderns are no different in this respect, quarrying into the ground for a mineral, jewels, dust that will provide indigo machinery, indigo technology, indigo fashion. The moderns tear the world apart, pay exorbitantly the earth, for a little look-right feel-right.