“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again."

‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’ - Zora Neale Hurston

Emmett comments, ”In this work, I attempt to grapple with the act of painting in its relation to constructions of space, knowledge, language and identity, as well as labour and its’ commodification (particularly within the context of Cape Town). This work seeks to further interrogate the privilege that makes one person’s work worth more than another person’s work or labour. I Feel Most Coloured… (2018), a site-specific performance, materializes in the act of writing/painting a wall at Zietz MOCAA as my constructed avatar character, The Cape Colourman. The phrase is a reference to a work by artist Glenn Ligon, who screen prints the line originally written in author Zora Neale Hurston’s, How It Feels To Be Colored Me (1928) repeatedly, even to the point of abstraction.” “During the performance, Colourman writes the phrase I Feel Most Coloured… with charcoal (black) and chalk (white), repeatedly on a painted background. The character then proceeds to reduce stones painted in the primary colours of yellow, red and blue to a fine powder form. In mixing the powdered stones with water to achieve a chromatic grey ‘paint’, I attempt to distil the alchemy of pigmentation production, and in addition, the liminality of a malleable identity. In this process, I use Colouredness as a medium to make sense of systems of classification, and power as well as to deconstruct them.” “The written text is painted over with the grey mixture to obliterate the phrase, whilst leaving remnants of it where more pressure was applied.”