The soft pliability of knitted textiles collides with the hard mechanics of engines and electronics in Chroma Columns, an installation developed by Eindhoven-based studio Raw Color.

Raw Color works across graphics, photography and textile design, creating research projects that explore the materialisation of colour. In Chroma Columns, this research centres upon the importance of colour to textile design.

Chroma Columns is a series of kinetic triangular columns, wrapped in different shades of Planum from Kvadrat Febrik – shades originally created by Raw Color. As motors drive the rotation of the columns, new colour combinations appear, the flexibility of the knitted textile wrapping smoothly around the underlying structure.

Raw Color’s columns gesture at functionality – capable of serving as either room dividers or acoustic panels – but the heart of the installation explores the role of colour in shaping a textile’s character. It is through colour that we initially come to apprehend a textile, and through the intersection of colour that a textile’s construction becomes legible. Chroma Columns, like all of Raw Color’s work, invites a viewer to think more deeply about the nature of a fundamental property that often goes under-examined.