‘Sedative Pink’ 🧠 showing now @jhammondprojects until July 27 • “While her photographs remain staged and hyper-stylised, Sedative Pink sees Calypso step away from her typically pristine aesthetic in favour of blood and mud. Colour is among Calypso’s most powerful tools, and she managed to find an intriguing link between colour and sport that fit particularly well with the context of the exhibition. “I was researching the colour pink and the story of Alexander Schauss came up,” Calypso says of the research scientist who first explored its potential psychological capabilities. “He was interested in how a very precise tone of pink could sap your energy.” Such is the reputation of Baker-Miller Pink that it’s been painted on walls in a prison, a youth clinic and a psychiatric ward as a technique for reducing aggression. Norwich City F.C. even used it to cover the walls in the changing rooms for away teams in the hope that it’d dampen their fighting spirit. However, for Calypso, an aesthetic reason was more than enough to justify her drawing upon this specific tone: “A lot of sports teams bought into the theory as a way of achieving marginal gains, but I find the colour visually pleasing. I realised that concrete changing rooms often look a lot like artist studios, so I turned my studio pink and made the work.” - Megan Williams, @creativereview