The Taste of The Name

‘Umami’ evokes a specific taste for those who understand the term, but what if your language doesn’t have that word – would you still know the taste? Borrowing from an experiment to find every name for every colour, The Taste of The Name is a fantastical exploration of language and perception. Using virtual reality to create a space that could not exist otherwise, this piece wrestles with the contradiction of experiencing the world through words and through our senses – what comes first? Viewers are suspended in a virtual world of sky and water, captive to a catalogue of descriptions of ‘blue’ — a paint colour, an aquarium, a shadow — and an impossible attempt to define them all. What would ‘blue’ feel like if you were seeing it for the first time? — S.L.