Bethany Collins’s Blue Noise (2014–2015) marks an important change in the artist’s practice, a shift away from using personal sources to appropriating published texts. In this series, Collins revisits celebrated Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s autobiographical essay “Positive Obsession,” repeating and isolating portions of the text in blue pastel so that it begins to form an evocative tangled constellation of language. For Collins, the shift to using blue pastel and ink marked a conceptual shift in her practice. “Blue feels responsive to the . . . coldness of exclusionary language,” she observed in a 2017 lecture, “It’s not inviting; it’s pushing you away.”
