2025 Turner Medal Award Meeting (in-person attendance)

The Turner Medal is awarded every two years since 1998 by the Colour Group (Great Britain) and recognises distinguished artists or art historians. We are pleased to announce that Dr Dominique Cardon has been selected as recipient of the Turner Medal 2025 for her exceptional contributions to the history and understanding of natural colorants in textiles.

Programme
17:00 Welcome and introduction
17:10 Turner Lecture and Q&A
18:10 Medal presentation and photos
18:20 Celebration reception with food and drinks (at Foyer)

Turner Medal 2025 Lecture: Colours from the past for a greener world

Abstract

As an historian and archaeologist dedicated to research into textile technology, Dominique Cardon very early became fascinated by the colours of the ancient textiles which her position at the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) offered her the marvellous opportunity to study. Since, before the mid-19th century, all colours on textiles were necessarily obtained from natural colorants, her lecture will narrate a lifelong journey of discovery of the world of natural dyes.

Natural colorants, used worldwide by all civilisations since prehistoric periods, are mostly extracted from the plant world, and also from some sea molluscs, sources of the true purple, and some coccid insects, sources of the prestigious scarlet and crimson reds. Their applications concern not only textiles, mats and basketry, but also painting and dyeing of skin, leather, hair and furs, etc. Identifying their use on ancient and ethnological artefacts, and understanding the processes by which they were applied, indispensably require transdisciplinary international collaborations, to which many fellow scholars and friends in the United Kingdom have brought important contributions that will be warmly acknowledged in the lecture.

An aspect of colour research that Dominique Cardon is currently exploring will also be presented, i. e. the unique insight into colour names and colour characterisations that can be gained from historical dyers’ recipe books illustrated with dyed textile samples: what are the CIE Lab chromatic characteristics of samples corresponding to a particular colour name? Do they change much according to the countries and regions where the dyers worked, or over time? The methodological approach combining experimental archaeology, that is reproducing the historical recipes, with spectrophotometric measurements of both the original samples and their reproductions, offers a vast new source of inspiration for experiments at different scales, in colour design, sustainable fashion and textile production. With the emergence of a society more and more conscious of the environmental challenges faced by our globe, and the development of a new « green economy », natural colorants currently attract strong renewed interest, due to their chromatic richness, to the beneficial biological activities presented by most of them and to their potential applications in various industrial branches besides textiles (agro-food and cosmetics, for instance). In her lecture, Dominique Cardon will provide an overview of these developments, drawing from collaborative projects she has participated in, is currently engaged with, or is informed about through her role as the scientific director of various recent international symposiums on natural dyes.