JOHANNA ROBINSON         TYRIAN PURPLE    GATES    NFT    WISH FULFILLMENT    PRESS     ARCHIVE    BIO

Mudhouse Residency, Agios Ioannis, Greece

For centuries, Tyrian Purple was worth three times the value of gold. Sourced from snails in the  Mediterranean Sea, the story goes that the pigment was discovered while a dog’s mouth turned bright purple after eating a snail. The color came to be associated with royalty until a synthetic replacement was developed in 1856, discovered accidently during an attempt to create quinine, an anti-malarial drug. 

While researching the history of the pigment in Crete at the Mudhouse Residency in 2024, I created a revisionist version of the story, where class struggle is carried out at the level of the sea snails, who were known to be cannibalistic and thus self-annihalating before they could be harvested for pigment.