Colours of Ulysses is a long-term art project by Irish artist Natalie Forrester, creating 933 original artworks — one for every page of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The project began in 2022 and will unfold over the next 20 years, with Natalie aiming to complete the full series in 2042. Each artwork begins with a single page of the novel. Sometimes the starting point is a colour, phrase, rhythm, place name, bodily image, memory, joke, mundane moment, smell, or strange passing thought.

Natalie responds to fragments: sensations, atmospheres, interruptions, linguistic textures, memory flashes, and the emotional weather of Ulysses. Some works are abstract; others are more direct, taking their cue from something vivid and physical on the page — a rose, a flattened yellow flower, oats.

Rather than illustrating Ulysses in one fixed way, Natalie moves between abstraction, association, and recognisable imagery. The series follows Joyce page by page, building a visual companion to one of Ireland’s most complex and influential literary works.

COU 100 marks the first major milestone in the project, bringing Colours of Ulysses to Dublin for Bloomsday 2026.

Why Ulysses?

Ulysses moves through Dublin on one day, yet contains whole inner worlds: ordinary life, memory, humour, grief, appetite, politics, religion, bodies, streets, voices, and sudden flashes of beauty.

For Natalie, an Irish artist living abroad, books have long been a way of staying connected to language, place, and home. In her house in rural Hungary, a small but growing English-language library sits alongside her studio life — added to on each trip home, with books for both adults and children. Joyce’s Dublin became part of that daily return.

As the works enter private collections and travel into different homes, the project also becomes a growing map of Joyceans, collectors, friends, and Irish connections around the world.

About Natalie Forrester

Natalie Forrester is an Irish artist based in rural Hungary. She studied at NCAD — the National College of Art & Design on Thomas Street, Dublin — where she earned a BDes in Printed Textiles, before working internationally in fashion and design, including time in New York and Qatar.

Her background in printed textiles, surface, pattern, colour psychology, and visual storytelling is central to her painting practice. Long before Colours of Ulysses, Natalie was interested in how colour carries meaning: yellow as optimism, warning, light, and unease; purple as creativity, mystery, and imagination.

Through Colours of Ulysses, this interest in colour has become embedded in the process. The work explores colour, memory, Irishness, literature, and the emotional charge of place — a project rooted in Ireland, shaped by distance, and built through the act of returning to the page.