When Newton looked in his prism he decided white light was a composite of all colours, rather than a pure, uniform substance. He used the word spectrum (from spectre, ‘to look’) to characterize his rainbow of seven colours, and proposed that colour was not an inherent property of matter but an illusion arising from human visual apparatuses in accordance with light emissions. But this didn’t float Goethe’s boat at all – he rejected Newton’s science where all matter was reduced to greyness and colour was only in the mind, and he set about resorting colour to the external world.

Whether colour exists in our heads or in things, there is a lot of it going on in Murayama Ryriko’s hanging fabric sculptures. Thousands of pieces of chemically died silk are painstakingly stitched together by the artist, forming a stained glass window effect where the hues shift under different light conditions. These photos were taken at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa exhibition Shift earlier this year.