FTS Palettes - Bell

Inspired by Larry Bell's Mirage Series #7 (1988), our palette explores the artist's fascination with colour, layering and visual perception. Five carefully selected colours, available in New Zealand wool and 8-ply acrylic.

LARRY BELL

Born 1939 · American · Minimalism / Light and Space

Larry Bell is an American artist who has devoted much of his career to exploring what happens when light meets a surface. Best known for his extraordinary glass cubes and sculptures, he became an important figure in California's Light and Space movement. His work investigates reflection, transparency and perception, often making solid objects appear almost weightless.

Bell's creative process involves an unusual mixture of artistic intuition and industrial technology. Using specialised vacuum-coating equipment, he applies incredibly thin layers of material to glass, paper and other surfaces, creating subtle optical effects and unexpected colour combinations. His experiments eventually led to his Vapor Drawings, Mirage works and remarkable suspended Light Knots.

For Bell, colour isn't simply something you apply to a surface. It's something that changes with light, movement and the position of the viewer. He's spent decades proving that an empty glass box can be infinitely more interesting than it sounds.

MIRAGE SERIES #7 (1988)

Larry Bell has spent decades exploring the curious relationship between light, materials and the human eye. His Mirage Series #7, created in 1988, belongs to a body of work developed from his experiments with reflective surfaces, layered materials and the optical effects they produce. The work combines his fascination with sophisticated technology and a surprisingly improvisational creative process.

Bell's Mirage works extend his earlier experiments with glass and metallic coatings into layered, two-dimensional compositions. Colours and surfaces interact in ways that challenge our perception of depth, making something apparently simple considerably more complicated the longer we look at it.

Our palette translates this fascination with colour and visual relationships into yarn. The result is a little less scientifically ambitious, admittedly, but considerably easier to knit with.