Seamus Murphy, Maeve O’Sullivan, Jean Noviel, Joanna Grant, Peter Branson, Jeanette Lowe, Majella Haugh, Margo Ovcharenko, John Saunders, Zoe Murdoch, Ruth Stacey, James Meredith, Howard Wright, Ceara Conway, Kathleen McCracken, Sarah James, Brónagh Corr-McNicholl, Rachael Mead, R. Joseph Capet, Alannah Robins, Patrick Mullan, Jane Clark, Sue Morgan, Matthew Sweeney, Alastair Phillip Wiper, Bill Wolak, Clare McCotter, George Bolster, Lizz Murphy, Linda Anne Atterton.
This issue encourages the consideration of the vital connotations of the concept of ‘blue’ to the human condition and the individual’s contemplation of place, purpose, self and essence. The strong association of the colour blue with the natural (the sea and sky), the broken (melancholy) and the forbidden (pornography) have led to said colour concurrently evoking ideas of apparent wholesomeness, failure and seedy delinquency. Blue runs underneath us and domes above us; it is what bore us and what we aspire through imagination to return to: another dimension, another means of perceiving, breathing, moving, experiencing… It is the colour of the most subtle moods of pain, not burning with the disarming immediacy of horror or despair but throbbing in mellow multiplicity and tonal diversity, slowly moving through the depths of reflection. Blue dances with dappled light, altering perception and renewing reflection. In creative discourses we take it from outside us and hold it as our own, making our subtle moods of humanity material by weaving them through its soft, swelling diversity. Blue was our home, to blue we long to return. We wish to wallow in its mellow discontent hoping for a return to the good old days. Days that never did or could have existed: days that define us. A free copy can be found below: