Aaron Ford | Untitled (glass piece) i

Untitled (glass piece) i

Oil on glass, Murex shells

90 x 122 cm

2025

£2,800 GBP

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Aaron Ford’s painted sheets of glass, resting delicately on Murex shells, echoes the ancient origins of Tyrian purple. Once reserved for the elites of Carthage and Rome. Using layered washes of blue and purple tones, the work gestures toward the movement of both pigment and power across time, tracing how a single colour became a marker of status, empire, and control.

The Murex shells beneath the glass recall the legend of Tyrian purple’s discovery, famously depicted in Peter Paul Rubens’ The Discovery of Purple by Hercules’s Dog (c. 1636). In the myth, Hercules' dog bit into a sea snail, staining its mouth with the deep purple hue. This chance encounter led to the dye’s prized use by nobles; an association that migrated across cultures and civilisations, much like the people and icons Ford’s work reflects upon.

Suspended between fragility and resilience, the glass suggests both the fleeting nature of power and the persistence of histories embedded in materials. By resting on the very shells that once produced imperial purple, Ford’s work collapses past and present, questioning how symbols of status and identity continue to shift over time.

Tyrian purple, has its origins along the Mediterranean coast, with both Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) and regions of Tunisia, including Djerba and Carthage, serving as key centres of its production. The dye was derived from the secretions of the Murex sea snail, which thrived in these coastal waters. Tyre became renowned for refining and monopolising this labor-intensive process, giving the dye its name, but Carthage (founded as a Phoenician colony by settlers from Tyre) became another major hub of production and trade. As Carthage rose to power, it inherited and expanded the dye industry, embedding it within broader networks of Mediterranean commerce. With Rome’s conquest of Carthage in 146 BCE, control of the dye trade shifted, and Tyrian purple became a marker of imperial authority, worn exclusively by Roman elites. Tunisia’s historical role in producing this coveted pigment thus ties it directly to the broader movement of power, culture, and colonisation across the Mediterranean, from Phoenician trade routes to Roman imperialism and beyond.