Since I was in graduate school over 20 years ago and discovered cycling, I’ve tried to reconcile my training as an athlete and my practice as an artist. I think that the energy required to do both comes from a similar place and I’ve tried to figure out how to make riding or running or walking my actual artistic practice with varying degrees of success. There is precedent for this – the English artist Hamish Fulton makes the act of walking the central part of his artistic practice. Through his work he elegantly addresses familiarizing oneself with nature as a way to respect it, and that in turn as a way to address climate change. The sort of artifacts that he makes post walk are also tied to the land he travels through their size, form, and materials, but these things he makes are secondary to the walks, more of a way to share the walks with others in a gallery setting.
I always come back to wanting to make things. Making things is how I understand the world around me and how I express my thoughts in the way that is most intuitive, not in a linear way, but in a way that is more meandering. And while I know that riding bikes, running, and walking inspire my work, making those the actual work, hasn’t felt like enough. It hasn’t satisfied the urge to make things.
When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina a few weeks ago, less than 100 miles away, and people’s entire lives were swept away and the actual topography of the mountains violently changed in a moment, everything suddenly seemed very ephemeral. Some of the most destructive aspects of climate change were here.
Climate change is something I’ve wanted to address more directly in my work for a long time, but I think all of the attempts I’ve made would be upsetting for a casual gallery goer, and so they’ve never seen the light of day. It’s important to me that my work at the very least not be depressing for those who experience it, so none of my attempts at addressing the ecological crisis have ever hit the mark for me.
The project I’ve been working on using natural dyes to color handkerchiefs for next spring, coupled with another project I’m expanding on (the boulders from my spring exhibit at The Art Gallery at Congdon Yards, which you can see here at approximately 1 minute into this video tour of the show), together start to address nature and ecological issues through textiles. The hankies suspended in the air are each dyed using natural plant and insect derived dyes that have been used throughout history. The boulders on the ground are made by compressing and tightly binding cast off textiles commercially dyed. As you probably know, the fashion industry pollutes through its processing and dyeing of fabrics and uses astonishing amounts of water. It also creates literal mountains of garbage. These projects will be coupled with other sculpture, video, and sound, that I hope can effectively address climate change while keeping true to my values as an artist. I still believe in beauty and dreaming and poetry.
Last weekend on a forest walk with my husband and our son, I noticed all of the acorns on our path. Acorns, along with oak leaves and bark, can be used to make dyes varying in color from yellow, tan, green, brown, and even violet. The three of us collected pieces from the ground, and later that day, my son and I prepared them for dyeing fabric. He used a hammer to smash the acorns as I whittled away the bark, and we put each collection in a jar with water. They’ll soak for a week or so before I can extract the dye. As for the leaves, I poured boiling water on them, left them to sit overnight in a pot, and simmered them in the morning with hankies. After a day, the hankies were various shades of creamy yellow and orange.
While I still am not clear on how to make a walk my artistic practice (maybe I simply need to declare that it is?), the act of walking and collecting plant matter to generate color for my work is deeply satisfying. I’m enjoying all the research on which plants to use for lasting color, how to extract the color, and tangentially all the social history around textiles and natural dyes, which ties into culture and economy.
I’m curious to see where these projects take me.
