Purple
The Genuine Space of Language, Communication and Genuine Understanding.
July 2026
Helene Lundbye Petersen on speaking genuinely.
by Maria Belton
General Introduction
In a world saturated with images, information and noise, Danish artist and philosopher Helene Lundbye Petersen has built an entire artistic universe around connection, presence, and colour. Her life’s work, /WhitePageProject, began with a single gesture : the offering of a blank white page — and has since evolved into a living, breathing artwork that weaves together philosophy, performance, writing, and painting. At its core lies a call to return to what she names the Genuine: the raw, unfiltered resonance between self, other, and existence itself. Through her Colour Spectrum of Genuine Being, each hue becomes a space of emotion and insight — an experience to enter rather than a concept to grasp.
The Purple Space
Purple marks a transition in your work, away from the White Beginnings, and the Goddess Mythology of Blue, Orange, Red, Green, and Yellow. Can you describe what this Space is about?
Purple is the Space of Language. It holds, frames and contains the streams of reflections, words, subconscious realisations, and the residue of everything ever said, thought or interpreted.
Purple does not define language narrowly, as spoken language with grammar, syntax or translation. Rather, it includes all forms that lead to communication, speaking and understanding: words, actions, body, feelings and spatial awareness.
The Purple Space offers us a way to listen to - and understand - what we, and others, are genuinely trying to say. It provides a structure of awareness able to cut through confusion and access the Genuine language—the kind that brings clarity, wisdom and profound understanding. Where we can see beyond performance, manipulation or surface-level information and recognise what is genuinely being communicated, this space is able to bridge our different understanding and find a common language.
How did Purple become part of the Colour Spectrum of Genuine Being?
As you know, all the books are created as calligraphic manuscripts, written by hand, from the first to the last page, without corrections. What initiates these manuscripts are found notebooks—objects that, by colour and design, call to me as a space that needs to built by exploring them with words and drawings. It is as if the work already exists and simply waits for its Colour Space to be expressed. All the notebooks thus far in the spectrum, I had found myself, but not Purple.
I never particularly liked the colour, and would not have chosen to purchase a purple notebook myself. One day, a violinist I collaborated with gifted me one. I accepted it with gratitude, but I did not know where to place it.
After completing White, Blue, Orange, Red, Green and Yellow, I realised Purple was the necessary bridge. It became the Space through which the mythology of the Goddesses could be translated into five active languages: knowledge and wisdom (words), body (space), will (action), love (feelings), and the Genuine (the integration of all).
I had the purple notebook shipped from Copenhagen to New York and wrote the book there by hand.
What is The Purple Book about?
The Purple Book — On Language functions as a living encyclopaedia of expression. Its purpose is to awaken awareness of how we are communicating all the time. Language flows through our thoughts, bodies, actions and emotions. It cannot be reduced to words or images alone; it must reflect the truth of what we genuinely feel, understand and experience as one whole.
This book is the largest and heaviest of all my books - not only in volume, but also in energy. It is demanding, because it calls us to notice what is genuinely said, felt, or heard, and to align communication with authentic understanding. It opens our habits of viewing communication in limited terms to actually speak our whole life as language. That shift means you suddenly become aware of how people, and yourself, conduct themselves in traffic, at the grocery store, in the media. You begin to look beyond the immediate reactions and see it all as a language trying to speak about what is genuinely going on. And that has to be heavy, and vast.
And have you changed your view of Purple after writing this book?
It has changed, yes, I am drawn to it now with a new awareness, but also respect its complexity. Historically, purple was one of the rarest and most costly dyes. It was extracted from thousands of sea snails through a process that required immense labour. That rarity made it associated with extreme wealth and exclusivity. In the ancient world, Purple was associated with imperial power, and later extended to royal and papal power. It is connected to imagination, and in popular culture, it is a colour connected to witches and princesses.
After writing The Purple Book, I see the colour purple in the light of the depth and insight it holds—like the space to genuinely understand everything, which creates its extreme mystery as well as its magnitude. It is a tricky colour that carries something that can be both wicked and manipulated alongside extreme mystical insight, the heights and depths of expressing, speaking, understanding and communicating. Just like Language.
How did you experience Purple when you began painting it?
Of all the Colour Spaces, Purple has been the most comprehensive to work with.
The heaviness of The Purple Book led me make the largest painting in the Spectrum series so far. I decided to do only one painting, because Language is like a key — one place where everything is held, and can fall into place or into chaos.
When I began painting, I placed the large canvas on a vast table in the centre of my studio so I could work from every angle. It ended up occupying almost the entire room. It also was a tricky colour to work with. I began painting during a dark November evening in Denmark. Under artificial light, the tone seemed right. But the next morning, natural light revealed a bluish hue — far too cold for what I was seeking. Purple is extraordinarily sensitive. It can lean towards a cold, distant blue or toward an almost red, pinkish intensity. I was searching for the precise harmony between blue and red — which for me stand for the balance between wisdom and will — where the tone can carry the depth, complexity, mystery and resonance of this Colour Space. Eventually, I found the hue that held that equilibrium.
The canvas proved to be too big for my studio at the time, and I had to remove the double doors from my 17th-century studio warehouse to move the canvas out.
At one point I thought: Helene, why did you make it this big? But it had to be. Language is vast. It is the key between our inner and outer worlds. Its scale mirrored the magnitude of language itself, too large to ignore, too essential to reduce.
How does that meaning of Purple translate into the imagery?
The painting mirrors the structure of the book: four lines that each represents its own type of language, converge into a circle symbolising the Genuine Language that holds them all— the point at which they reach balance together.
The image becomes a visual meditation on coherence. Where the lines meet as one, reflecting complete integration — where words, actions, feelings, and insight speak in harmony and genuine understanding.
Why is Purple important in our everyday communication?
We constantly speak through words, gestures, action and feeling — often without noticing. Even simple interactions, reveal that language extends far beyond speech.
When I communicate with my dog, for instance, it is primarily through body and presence, more than words. The language of will speaks through action, the language of feelings speaks through emotional resonance, and if we do not decode why we feel as we do, our reactions remain obscure — even to ourselves.
Purple is equally relevant for the individual as for the collective, because Purple is not only about personal expression. It is about collective understanding.
How does this symbolism, and heaviness translate into your understanding of Purple as an existential space?
It's a way of tidying up in communication and language. Somehow, this book or this space is very important in this time where we produce so much conscious information, conscious branding. We manipulate words and images to a degree never seen before. Purple is asking us to cut through all that noise, and become conscious and aware of what we genuinely want to say.
What do you genuinely feel, understand? What do you genuinely hear from that other person that speaks to you? Why are we genuinely arguing?
It is a space for cleaning communication — not to make it prettier, but to make it more authentic, aligned and aware.
How was it to translate your painting into a Print?
I needed to cut half of it away to fit into the Print series, so it holds less of the vastness of the languages, and zooming into the most important, where they all meet in the Genuine Language.
Portraying Language, Artist Studio on Studiestræde 17A, Copenhagen, Denmark, Photo by Morten Eggert.
What do you hope viewers feel when encountering Purple?
A recognition that language is not merely information but a bridge between inner experience and outer presence. And an awareness of the multiple languages they inhabit.And perhaps a quiet realisation that genuine communication is not about winning or performing — but about coherence.
To read more about the Purple Space, dive into her exhibition here: The Purple Space
Purple Print: 
