Paint Chips

I have a box full of paint chip sample cards from remodelling our house. What to do with them? I looked around on the web and found 2 interesting projects:

  1. Suzanne Heyd composed poems on the chips with a typewriter (that’s one to the right, more here). Phylum Press published a chapbook of her work called Crawl Space.

  2. Rachel Bergert‘s project 100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days: Every day for one hundred days she picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing. Here’s what she wrote in response to “bee pollen,” a pale yellow:

    At some point in childhood, we start having memories, born of experience and not of photographs or family lore. Before I had memories, our attic had a wasp nest. It was discovered and fumigated but not removed. My first memories are of buzzing, of lying awake at night in terror, of the wasps that had surely returned.

    See more entries here.

Do you know of other interesting projects using paint sample chips? — Let me know of any in the comments. Suzanne Heyd — Crawl Space
Page from Suzanne Heyd’s Crawl Space

3 thoughts on “Paint Chips”

  1. I saw a birdhouse roof “shingled” with them. Can’t remember where, but the directions said to cut them to size and stagger and overlap. You always lead us to the best sites. Thanks for being here.

  3. Debbie McNulty and a colleague had an exhibit at the Art League of Houston several years ago called “The White Show.” The two artists collected hundreds of paint chips in all shades of white, ecru, cream, etc., and pinned them to the walls, along with small objects that were described by the marketing names (“swan’s feather,” “cotton ball”). The floor of the space had a bunch of “white” objects, including a wedding dress they had bought at a garage sale that, by coincidence, turned out to be the wedding dress of the League’s director from her wedding back in the ’70’s!

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