For the last couple of months, I’ve been dyeing hundreds of handkerchiefs using natural dyes as I work on a project for a show in the spring. So far I have successfully worked with madder, weld, cochineal, pomegranate, myrobalan, cutch, various parts of the oak tree, walnut, and indigo.
I waited to work with indigo till I had some experience under my belt. It’s a trickier dye to work with than others because it’s insoluble in water and has to be reduced to a water-soluble form. To make an indigo vat, you have to follow steps to create the chemical reactions needed for the indigo to convert to a dye rather than a pigment.
To make the indigo vat, you have to create an alkaline environment in the vat (adding lye or soda ash to the water for example), remove the oxygen (adding thiourea dioxide in my case), add the indigo “starter” you made earlier, check the pH, adjust the pH to the correct one for the fiber you’re dyeing, then you can start. You then adjust the vat as needed each work session, adding the necessary ingredients for each chemical change to occur.
Other colors are much easier to work with and just involve steeping dyestuff for hours or days.
What’s been so exciting about working with indigo the last 2 weeks is that I’ve added a whole side of the color spectrum to my handkerchief palette. I’ve been able to overdye reds and yellows to make a range of turquoise, greens, violets, and lavenders. If you look at the images below, you’ll notice that some of the handkerchiefs are much darker than others. This involves dipping the hankies multiple times in the indigo, anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes at a time. And the magic of indigo is that when you take fabric out of the vat, it comes out yellow or green and only turns blue in contact with air. It oxidizes over the course of the next 30 minutes to reach its peak blueness. You can then dip it in the vat again to make it darker and bluer.
Giving fabric time to soak in the indigo vat.A range of colors using indigo alone and overdyed on myrobalan and weld.A range of colors using indigo overdyed on pomegranate and weld.A range of colors using indigo overdyed on cochineal and matter.
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.
My son holding some of the acorns we collected on our forest walk (also to be used for their color)Holding oak leaves and branches from which I’ll extract color
I’ve been working on a project for which I’m collecting handkerchiefs, dyeing them as many different colors as I can, and suspending them from the ceiling for an exhibit that opens next year. I have more than 200 handkerchiefs, many vintage, some donated, some new. Last month, I spent several days preparing the hankies to be dyed. Because they are cotton and I’m using natural dyes, there is a process I follow to make sure they accept the dye and stay that color as long as possible. The project will be exhibited for 4 months and lit by gallery lights, so they need to be lightfast. This process entails washing the fabric, scouring it (to remove any waxes and oils that might be used in the manufacturing process), then mordanting it with gallnut, followed by aluminum acetate, then a quick dip in calcium carbonate. The mordanting process allows the fabric to accept the dye, make the color as intense as possible, and hold onto it, otherwise it would just wash out.
The exhibit next year will be in the Sawtooth School of Art‘s Davis gallery. With them, I’m organizing community events during which we’ll make some of the work for the show. The first of these events was a workshop led by my friend and fellow artist Nicole Asselin last weekend. With the students, we dyed some handkerchiefs using madder, weld, and pomegranate, all natural dyes that have been used for millennia. Students also had a chance to play with the dyes on bandanas they could take home.
Here Nicole presents some key concepts with a bunch of undyed hankies and some common dyestuff in the foreground.
A student keeps an eye on the madder root dye pot.
Dyed hankies: madder on the left, pomegranate center, and weld on the right. Some of the colors have also been modified using an iron bath and citric acid.
Hankies from last night’s work in the dye studio: indigo on the right and weld overdyed with indigo on the left. You can see here the tiny labels that I’m attaching to each hanky with the date and dyestuff used on each one.
I was sick last week: a sinus infection and then a reaction to the antibiotic prescribed for it, and then a new antibiotic… and boy did all that kick my ass. Having no choice but to rest, I had to miss teaching most of my classes, and when I did go back to work, I couldn’t make it a full day. During that time, I did a lot of thinking, and had a lot of questions around my art practice. Some self-doubt crept in too, and it was when I came out on the other end this week, that the gratitude of feeling better – of having the energy to get back to some exercise and to feel like I was firing on all cylinders when teaching – that I had a new perspective on my work.
In the last few years, because my practice extended into mediums other than painting and drawing, I have wondered if I was diluting my work, or missing out on the kind of growth that comes with focusing on one medium, or if I might be perceived as not being a serious artist, and on and on… the kind of thinking that might sometimes help strengthen beliefs, but that more often brings on generally crappy feelings.
The kind of gratitude I am feeling – the kind that comes from feeling OK after having been sick – is a clarity that I am on the right path and that I am growing as an artist. The growth is subtle now and my path isn’t linear, but that’s OK.
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That Good Darkness, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
This painting That Good Darkness is available from Artfolios here.
I’m back from a mind blowing 2 weeks at Penland School of Craft learning to work glass with Jessica Jane Julius and Erica Rosenfeld. Our workshop culminated in an edible installation and performance in the hot shop. I had never worked with glass before, and have a whole new appreciation for how complex the medium is. The experience also opened up my eyes to what performance and installation could be. I came home full of ideas and stoked to make new work!
I’m not sure how this will play out in my work yet. I realized while I was there that I was particularly interested in the optical qualities of glass, like making lenses and prisms for example. I’ve played with distortion and blurring of images both in my painting and video work, and I’m curious about how using a glass element could alter something seen through it.
I also wanted to make simple well balanced vessels while I was there, and learned how challenging it is to make elegant shapes with glass. You have to work quickly while it’s hot, with the correct amount of force, and a surprisingly light subtle touch. And it’s the most humbling of materials. It can be impossible to save pieces when things go wrong, and failure is catastrophic. Pieces often deformed beyond repair and/or shattered.
I enjoyed cold working glass – the work you do using shop tools to work the glass after it’s been annealed. The tools felt familiar – they are similar to wood shop tools. The tools use diamond grit to cut and grind, and aren’t as sharp or abrasive as wood tools. Water is used throughout the cold working process to keep the glass cool and to rinse off the silica as it is ground or cut off. It was satisfying to properly finish my pieces or in some cases to alter them completely using these tools.
I loved working in the hot shop. With four furnaces and all sorts of torches constantly running, it was the hottest environment I’ve ever worked in – over 100F during the day – and the work is very physical. The pipes and rods used to gather and heat the glass are long and heavy, and you have to keep rotating them as you work. Working in teams was another highlight – we all depended on each other to make work.
My team working together to make a dome during the performancethe Penland hot shop!Day 1 – pressing shapes into the hot glass fresh out of the furnacethe class installation with foodsome of my workthe Lily Pond I accidentally found when I got off trail on a walkthe view from the Pines food hall
A couple weeks ago on a bike ride, we rode by this farm and I knew I had to come back to paint it. It is conveniently located across the road from a water treatment plant, so I planned to park there to get a good view of the farm land.
This morning a friend and I met there to paint, and we had a chance to chat with the guys who run the water treatment plant. This is one of my favorite parts about working in plein air; I often get to meet people who know stories about the land I’m observing, and this morning was no exception. After finishing our paintings, we got a tour of the plant! Fascinating stuff… and I love the OSHA sign that lives in their lab.
When a couple stopped while driving by, they shared with us what they think is another beautiful landscape nearby. And they’re right! It’s a spot I’ve noted many times, and forgot to return with my painting kit. So I know where I’m headed next…
This month I’ve been painting a group of portraits of my family. I started with myself, then my husband, and finally our son. It’s been an interesting practice to notice how the experience of painting each one of us changes. For my portrait and my husband’s I worked from life: looking into a mirror for mine and asking my partner to pose for his. One of the challenges of working from life is needing to translate a three-dimensional thing into the two dimensions of a painting.
For my son’s portrait, rather than asking him to pose for hours, I opted to work from a photo instead. While it’s easier – in a way – to work from a photo because the camera does the work of flattening life’s three dimensions into two, it’s also easy to become obsessive about EVERY SINGLE DETAIL. This isn’t necessarily a good thing when painting. Part of painting is learning to discern which details to include and how much to leave out. The longer we stare at our subject, the more we discover. And if we include every little thing, the result will surprisingly look less realistic because of how our eyes and brains perceive what we see in real life. For example, if I paint an area in shadow with the same degree of detail and contrast as a part in the light, something will seem off when we look at the painting. For the spatial effect to work, we actually have to lessen the contrast and level of detail in the shadows.
Another part of what makes painting so interesting and complicated is the making of decisions of how to portray something or someone in a way that reveals an aspect of them and/or of the artist. It is an interesting challenge to make a realistic image that still looks like a painting rather than trying to make it look like a photo, which is more of an exercise in copying.
detail of my son’s portrait – The large brush mark that appears across the face is from another painting. I made all 3 portraits on top of older work.
There’s also something magical about seeing an image in a painting, and then as you step closer to the work, gradually realizing that the image is just a collection of brush marks. (Have I mentioned that I often get into trouble in museums when I get a little too close to paintings?)
Here’s a collection of images showing the process of making the portrait of my son, from start to finish:
This week I made a portrait of my husband Tim. Since I made a self-portrait a couple weeks ago, I decided to make a trio of portraits that include our son too. Below are images of the process of day 1 and day 2. I’m really enjoying painting these at this scale. It was also fun to recreate one of my paintings in the background of this one.
Also this week I came across this photo of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera watching a solar eclipse with friends in 1932.
And I learned about about “Andrea Y. Motley Crabtree—the first woman to pass the rigorous U.S. Army test for deep sea diving, a highly specialized aspect of military service,” when I saw this portrait of her at the Met museum.
My family had planned to go backpacking last weekend, and I spent the week trying to figure out just the right spot for us: the right distance, difficulty, and weather conditions. A mellow option on Commissary Ridge and up to Mount Mitchell? A strenuous hike over six of the tallest mountains on the East Coast? Or The Seven Sisters, a tough hike near Montreat? By dinner time Friday night, with the predicted weekend weather in the mountains much colder than we’d expected, we decided to cancel our plans and go backpacking at another (warmer) time. Our son is only 11 years old, and while he enjoys backpacking, we want to keep it fun for him. Being out in the elements and cold all weekend didn’t sound like fun.
After all that anticipation though, I was mentally prepared to do something epic. A cycling friend proposed an 80-miler with a big climb on Saturday – perfect! So with some sun and temps in the 50’s and 60’s, a group of us headed out toward Stone Mountain and climbed Oklahoma, a nasty 3-mile long climb with an average grade of 6% and some super steep pitches toward the top. What’s special about this though is that I haven’t had the desire to put in big miles on the bike in a few years. It felt good to want to do that, and although I haven’t put in the on-bike training I would have preferred before a ride like this, I have been doing some long hikes this year. It turns out that the long miles on foot coupled with some short hard rides were enough to be able to complete the 80 miles and feel recovered enough to ride a relaxed 45 miles the next day.
I think what helped a lot was that after over two decades of riding my bike, I have finally learned how to properly fuel up for sustained energy. Marathon training and lots of hiking helped me by learning to rely on more real food rather than “performance” food (bars, gels, and the like).
Sunday was Mother’s Day, and we celebrated with a picnic in one of our favorite spots. We went for a walk afterward and spotted beavers! We stayed for a while spying on them and watching as they silently swam down the creek and made their way over and under fallen logs. They are surprisingly big! On the way out of the woods, I noticed some interesting shapes, textures, and colors around us, and planned to come back with my sketchbook. There seemed to be lots of possibilities for abstraction.
That evening while our son was playing with his Nerf gun, he shot a dart at one of my 6-foot tall paintings in the living room. I’m happy to say the painting survived.
The next day, sketchbook and watercolors in tow, I set up a little camp chair to make some drawings. I made a few thumbnail sketches and color studies, then watched ducks darting around and geese as they strolled with their little ones.
