Colours of Letters

Ayşe Erkmen’s artistic practice draws on conceptual relationships she forms with space, time and material. Unexpected directions and distances, architectural and environmental scales, and the invisible along with the visible contribute to the experiential aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Colour and typography take dominant roles in some of Erkmen’s works. In certain pieces, she creates her own font by using punctuation marks, such as commas, parentheses and underscores; while in others, she borrows and incorporates ready-made fonts. She also integrates colours from Pantone colour codes as ready-mades into her works, or as in some of her pieces, she welcomes the colours of ready-made materials that are utilised in the work. In "Colours of Letters", Ayşe Erkmen renders her letter-colour synaesthesia visible by assigning colours to the letters and numbers in a manner that can be perceived by the viewer. The italic letters of the Vag Rounded Black font, transferred to plexiglass, cover both sides of a divided wall and as if spread on two adjacent pages, appear with the colours in which the artist sees them. According to Erkmen, A is always red. E is always a dark navy blue.