Barn Owl (Tell Me A Secret)

A solo exhibition in collaboration with digital artist Bill Newsinger, to showcase new works inspired by the natural sciences’ collection at New Walk Museum in Leicester. With a focus on the order, variety and beauty of colour in nature using paint, wax pastels, spray paint, ink, graph paper and 24 carat gold leaf onto photographs of birds from the collection. Stevens was inspired by Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, an early colour dictionary, outlining colour matches across the natural kingdoms. Darwin referred to it in his notebooks from the voyage of The Beagle. One of the most significant colour dictionaries’, A Nomenclature of Colours for Naturalists (1886), was developed by Robert Ridgeway, an American ornithologist for bird identification, which was developed in 1912 naming 1,115 colours, paving the way for the pantone colour charts of today.