Colour Blind prejudice is in the eye of the beholder
Colourblind was a multiple of fifty booklets created in a concertina style from black card. Three images were attached inside facing pages in the format of standard optometry colour blindness tests. These being circular pictures made up of green/red-based dots, which hold a concealed image that can only be seen by those who are not colour blind. The three images were alll forms of racist insult; two in English (Wog, Paki) and one in Urdu script (Gora, meaning ‘white westerner’ impolitely). The cover of the booklet gave the title and artist’s name (COLOURBLIND, Shaeron Caton-Rose) in centrally placed gold script in the same way that the Ishikawa Colour Blind Test is usually fronted. Each booklet was edition numbered and signed on the back. Colourblind was placed in Artsparkle, Leeds and Mulitplus, Newcastle in 2004 and then shown at Saltburn Art Gallery and the Lowry Centre in 2005. Colourblind was made in response to my experience of living in Bradford. The piece was originally formulated after the ‘race’ riots of 2000; riots that were much more to do with poverty and drug gang warfare than racial difficulties. However, Bradford is not an easy city to live in, if one wishes to remain completely and permanently politically correct. It is far more tempting to slip into condemnation or complaint and to blame bad behaviour simply on culture and race. This piece is a challenge to myself as much as anyone, because however egalitarian we all think we are, our human nature slips in the occasional xenophobic reaction against our best intentions.