PHOTO BY VALENTINA POPOVA, WWW.NAUA.MYPORTFOLIO.COM
I was fortunate to have been born to two fascinating people who had arrived in Australia with their families as refugees from the mid-century war in Europe and met at university.
My father was a scientist and musician who had studied both piano and violin to concert standard and (among other things) had built himself a telescope from an old brass shell casing, grinding the lenses by hand and building the supporting tripod from salvaged timber.
My mother was an artist, poet and dreamer who wove cloth in traditional Latvian patterns; designed and knitted us complicated snowflake-patterned ski sweaters; and made our ceramic dinnerware herself. The three generous bowls that held the “starch, protein and vegetable matter” in the centre of the table for distribution onto our plates were marvellously glazed so that there was a veneer of midnight ocean hues along with clear areas that allowed the rich red of the terracotta clay to shine through. I loved those bowls, and though they were destroyed in a bushfire along with our home, their colours and forms remain strong in my memory.
Though so different, my parents shared many interests, among them language (both German and Latvian were spoken in our home) and gardening; creating magical green places in which my childish imagination could run wild. Pa raised trees from collected seeds, grafted multiple fruit varieties together before it became fashionable and grew splendid vegetables. He was also an early guerrilla gardener, quietly planting indigenous tree species into vacant public places.
My mother filled any available space in our garden with flowers and had a particular passion for roses. She could grow chrysanthemum plants from a single stolen leaf and spent her summers putting up preserves, making jam and cooking cordials to help us through winter. If she sat down to rest, she would pick up her embroidery. Mama also sewed all our clothes (even shirts for Pa). It was not until I became a grumpy teenager that I was permitted a pair of jeans.
Tilly, Queen of Filth, inspecting the work.
Each Easter, Mama would gather herbs from the kitchen garden along with strawberry and clover leaves and dried grasses (to use as a resist) and we would sit down together at the kitchen table, carefully layering the fresh offerings inside dampened onion shells before resting an egg in the middle and then tying the whole thing up with thread, much as a spider might tie up their lunch.
It is a tradition that pre-dates Christianity and has been handed down the Latvian side of my family for as long as anyone can remember.
The bundling took place on the Saturday of the Easter weekend. The eggs were then placed in a pot with the leftover onion shells for good measure and brought to a simmer for 20 minutes or so before the heat was turned off and the strange stew allowed to cool while we shared a modest meal of tea and toast (leaving room for Sunday feasting). When the table had been cleared again, we would unwrap the eggs, marvelling at the prints on each one.
After drying, we would buff them with a greasy bacon rind, which made the eggs fairly glow. The onion-dyed thread would be care- fully wound onto paper spools for later use in embroidery or for crocheting lace edges onto handkerchiefs. Nothing was ever wasted, and my parents only bought something if they couldn’t make it themselves.
Small wonder that I grew up fascinated by plants and with a leaning toward the creative arts. My particular passion was for architecture and the design of spaces for living (which might also have been genetic, as my paternal great-grandfather was an architect). Sadly, my somewhat volatile (and regrettably immature) temper led me to abandon my studies before achieving a degree. In retrospect, I can see that I would not have taken kindly to a client wanting to interfere in my grand designs either, so perhaps it was for the best.
Happily, now in my 65th year, I am at last realising the long-held dream of designing my own home, to be built within sight of the sea, a project in which the only client to disagree with will be me.
But back to the story at hand. I was introduced to natural dyes by my maternal grandmother, who would use the leftover onion brew to tone down some of the more luridly printed cloth remnants she would bring home from the markets. But it was not until my late 20s that I commenced experimenting with bundling pieces of cloth (instead of eggs) with leaves and onion shells.
Recalling the joys of childhood potion-making, I also began to brew plant dyes, extracting them by slow steeping and then watching the colours deepen and change as the liquids were warmed and given time in vessels made of different metals (stainless steel, copper, iron and brass). My first explorations were with culinary herbs, then weeds, and eventually with eucalypts.
The genus eucalyptus is endemic to Australia and was a particular favourite of my father’s, who took us into old forests at any opportunity, 50 years before “forest bathing” became a fashionable divertisement.
I was raised on stories about the work of the eucalyptologist Ferdinand von Mueller, who also experimented with plant dyes but never unlocked the secret of the brilliant colours possible from the trees he loved above all others. Eucalypts are fascinating in that the dyes they contain undergo an alchemical change when the leaves are boiled for a period of time. It still seems miraculous to me that a blue-grey leaf can release a rich gold liquid that can dye a sample of cream-coloured wool a luminous rust red.
I have on several occasions been accused of misappropriating cultural knowledge by persons who are adamant that Australia’s First Nation people were familiar with the eucalyptus ecoprint, but I am confident this is not so. Sustaining the temperature required to boil water for 45 minutes (the minimum required to extract those red shades) is only possible in metal containers,* and given that their woven textiles (with the exception of fur, hair and feather belts) were made from cellulose/bast fibres, which respond to eucalyptus colour very differently than wool or silk, the only possibility might have been a cold leaf print (which would take months under a heavy weight) on a scraped animal skin.
*Australia’s first people were a stone culture, rather than a metal-based one, so I hold to my theory that these dyes were not known by them in the form we use them today.
There is certainly evidence of drawing on the insides of possum-skin cloaks using inks and paints, but none has been found yet of leaf prints.
When I eventually wrapped eucalyptus leaves in wool, way back in October of 1991, and boiled the bundle, I was astonished by the result. Initially, I considered the print more as a sustainable means of testing eucalypts for dye colour than as surface decoration in itself, but I was soon seduced by the ability to create unique and poetic cloths that spoke of the country in which they were dyed.
Thirty-two years (and several books and a master’s degree) later, I am still under the spell of this seemingly magical process that only requires leaves, water, heat and a protein (or suitably mordanted cellulose) substrate, along with a healthy dose of patience. It was not until 1998 that I gave it the name ecoprint, letting myself be guided by lichenologist Karen Diadick Casselman who had some years previously named her own approach to plant colour “ecodye.”*
*These days the two appellations are frequently confused or interchanged, but “ecodye” refers to the practice of dyeing solid colours using minimal mordants, while “ecoprint” is a contact print from plant matter.
It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of name, as many others who have adopted the practice now use toxic mordants along with barrier layers of plastic when making bundles: hardly ecologically sustainable.
For a while I considered calling it “eucaprint,” but as the technique can be performed (with cooking times and methods adjusted depending on the delicacy of the plant) with almost any form of vegetation, that made no sense. Bocoprint would be a snappy choice, but lacks the romance of the process, really best described as botanical alchemy and compressed as botanicalchemy.
I love that there is still so much to learn in this practice and, among other things, am presently researching safe and simple means of applying mordants for practitioners working in small spaces, with a view to offering the outcomes as a course at the School of Nomad Arts.
I make things to hang on walls, drape over beds and enfold bodies, taking particular delight in free-cutting garments and creating zero-waste shapes. For a while, I even supplied a store in Hollywood with one-off dresses that were re-constructed almost entirely from thrift-store finds. These days I would rather teach people to make their own, that way they can adjust the fit to suit their bodies and experience the joy of dyeing their clothes with local colour, while saving me the trouble of having to remind the shop for payment, bearing the expense of shipping to the store, paying my agent to “inspect the goods” and then (in one instance) finding that the store had documented me as an employee (!!!), presumably to save themselves some kind of import tax. Bizarre.
Being somewhat neurodivergent, stitching into patterned cloth unsettles me so I continue to sew all of my objects before they are dyed, setting white stitch to white cloth-like tracks across a snowy landscape before making what can only be described as a leap of faith and bundling the item with leaves to be either boiled or steamed, depending on the desired outcome.
In between making larger things, I weave from the shreds, fragments and moth-eaten morsels that have found their way to the studio floor. I imagine myself weaving a river and include silk, wool, linen and even hanji paper as my weft. I consider the entire farm as my studio (the indoor space is used primarily to record video lessons for the School of Nomad Arts) and take the most recent woven length out into the fields, draping it across rocks and mordanting it in puddles and buckets of rusty water. The leaves are collected on a quiet walk, the pot heated over a fire made with windfall sticks gathered from under the trees.*
*I get a lot of good exercise from gathering twigs. The smallest ones burn brightest and with the most heat, so I use a twig fire to bring the pot to a boil, then add a few more substantial pieces to keep the heat going steadily for a while. So long as the oxygen-to- fuel ratio is managed carefully and the wood is dry, you can have a virtually smokeless fire that generates no more pollutants than if the twigs had been permitted to rot under the trees from which they fell.
After it has cooled down again, I take the unwrapped piece back to the rocks, to contemplate the singeing together of the colours. I find it deeply satisfying to build cloth line by line, and then place myself unreservedly in the hands of the plant spirits, to accept whatever is offered.
Where to from here, then? I’m two years into my five-year plan to realise a youthful ambition to build a house of my own design within sight of the sea, where I will have better water security, will be closer to services as various bits of me start coming loose, and can concentrate on growing a perfumed garden rather than shepherding sheep and grubbing up thistles (I’m leaving those tasks to my eldest daughter), with a view to exploring the fragrance of place in addition to creating prints from gathered plants. I have invested in several intriguing alembic contraptions, am slowly learning the art of distilling and will be planting my new patch with trees and flowers carefully selected for their particular aromatic properties.
There is stitching still to be done, at least two books yet to write, a commission to make costumes for contemporary dance glimmering on the horizon — and whatever life is left to embrace wholeheartedly with open arms.
PHOTO BY VALENTINA POPOVA, WWW.NAUA.MYPORTFOLIO.COM
I was fortunate to have been born to two fascinating people who had arrived in Australia with their families as refugees from the mid-century war in Europe and met at university.
My father was a scientist and musician who had studied both piano and violin to concert standard and (among other things) had built himself a telescope from an old brass shell casing, grinding the lenses by hand and building the supporting tripod from salvaged timber.
My mother was an artist, poet and dreamer who wove cloth in traditional Latvian patterns; designed and knitted us complicated snowflake-patterned ski sweaters; and made our ceramic dinnerware herself. The three generous bowls that held the “starch, protein and vegetable matter” in the centre of the table for distribution onto our plates were marvellously glazed so that there was a veneer of midnight ocean hues along with clear areas that allowed the rich red of the terracotta clay to shine through. I loved those bowls, and though they were destroyed in a bushfire along with our home, their colours and forms remain strong in my memory.
Though so different, my parents shared many interests, among them language (both German and Latvian were spoken in our home) and gardening; creating magical green places in which my childish imagination could run wild. Pa raised trees from collected seeds, grafted multiple fruit varieties together before it became fashionable and grew splendid vegetables. He was also an early guerrilla gardener, quietly planting indigenous tree species into vacant public places.
My mother filled any available space in our garden with flowers and had a particular passion for roses. She could grow chrysanthemum plants from a single stolen leaf and spent her summers putting up preserves, making jam and cooking cordials to help us through winter. If she sat down to rest, she would pick up her embroidery. Mama also sewed all our clothes (even shirts for Pa). It was not until I became a grumpy teenager that I was permitted a pair of jeans.
Tilly, Queen of Filth, inspecting the work.
Each Easter, Mama would gather herbs from the kitchen garden along with strawberry and clover leaves and dried grasses (to use as a resist) and we would sit down together at the kitchen table, carefully layering the fresh offerings inside dampened onion shells before resting an egg in the middle and then tying the whole thing up with thread, much as a spider might tie up their lunch.
It is a tradition that pre-dates Christianity and has been handed down the Latvian side of my family for as long as anyone can remember.
The bundling took place on the Saturday of the Easter weekend. The eggs were then placed in a pot with the leftover onion shells for good measure and brought to a simmer for 20 minutes or so before the heat was turned off and the strange stew allowed to cool while we shared a modest meal of tea and toast (leaving room for Sunday feasting). When the table had been cleared again, we would unwrap the eggs, marvelling at the prints on each one.
After drying, we would buff them with a greasy bacon rind, which made the eggs fairly glow. The onion-dyed thread would be care- fully wound onto paper spools for later use in embroidery or for crocheting lace edges onto handkerchiefs. Nothing was ever wasted, and my parents only bought something if they couldn’t make it themselves.
Small wonder that I grew up fascinated by plants and with a leaning toward the creative arts. My particular passion was for architecture and the design of spaces for living (which might also have been genetic, as my paternal great-grandfather was an architect). Sadly, my somewhat volatile (and regrettably immature) temper led me to abandon my studies before achieving a degree. In retrospect, I can see that I would not have taken kindly to a client wanting to interfere in my grand designs either, so perhaps it was for the best.
Happily, now in my 65th year, I am at last realising the long-held dream of designing my own home, to be built within sight of the sea, a project in which the only client to disagree with will be me.
But back to the story at hand. I was introduced to natural dyes by my maternal grandmother, who would use the leftover onion brew to tone down some of the more luridly printed cloth remnants she would bring home from the markets. But it was not until my late 20s that I commenced experimenting with bundling pieces of cloth (instead of eggs) with leaves and onion shells.
Recalling the joys of childhood potion-making, I also began to brew plant dyes, extracting them by slow steeping and then watching the colours deepen and change as the liquids were warmed and given time in vessels made of different metals (stainless steel, copper, iron and brass). My first explorations were with culinary herbs, then weeds, and eventually with eucalypts.
The genus eucalyptus is endemic to Australia and was a particular favourite of my father’s, who took us into old forests at any opportunity, 50 years before “forest bathing” became a fashionable divertisement.
I was raised on stories about the work of the eucalyptologist Ferdinand von Mueller, who also experimented with plant dyes but never unlocked the secret of the brilliant colours possible from the trees he loved above all others. Eucalypts are fascinating in that the dyes they contain undergo an alchemical change when the leaves are boiled for a period of time. It still seems miraculous to me that a blue-grey leaf can release a rich gold liquid that can dye a sample of cream-coloured wool a luminous rust red.
I have on several occasions been accused of misappropriating cultural knowledge by persons who are adamant that Australia’s First Nation people were familiar with the eucalyptus ecoprint, but I am confident this is not so. Sustaining the temperature required to boil water for 45 minutes (the minimum required to extract those red shades) is only possible in metal containers,* and given that their woven textiles (with the exception of fur, hair and feather belts) were made from cellulose/bast fibres, which respond to eucalyptus colour very differently than wool or silk, the only possibility might have been a cold leaf print (which would take months under a heavy weight) on a scraped animal skin.
*Australia’s first people were a stone culture, rather than a metal-based one, so I hold to my theory that these dyes were not known by them in the form we use them today.
There is certainly evidence of drawing on the insides of possum-skin cloaks using inks and paints, but none has been found yet of leaf prints.
When I eventually wrapped eucalyptus leaves in wool, way back in October of 1991, and boiled the bundle, I was astonished by the result. Initially, I considered the print more as a sustainable means of testing eucalypts for dye colour than as surface decoration in itself, but I was soon seduced by the ability to create unique and poetic cloths that spoke of the country in which they were dyed.
Thirty-two years (and several books and a master’s degree) later, I am still under the spell of this seemingly magical process that only requires leaves, water, heat and a protein (or suitably mordanted cellulose) substrate, along with a healthy dose of patience. It was not until 1998 that I gave it the name ecoprint, letting myself be guided by lichenologist Karen Diadick Casselman who had some years previously named her own approach to plant colour “ecodye.”*
*These days the two appellations are frequently confused or interchanged, but “ecodye” refers to the practice of dyeing solid colours using minimal mordants, while “ecoprint” is a contact print from plant matter.
It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of name, as many others who have adopted the practice now use toxic mordants along with barrier layers of plastic when making bundles: hardly ecologically sustainable.
For a while I considered calling it “eucaprint,” but as the technique can be performed (with cooking times and methods adjusted depending on the delicacy of the plant) with almost any form of vegetation, that made no sense. Bocoprint would be a snappy choice, but lacks the romance of the process, really best described as botanical alchemy and compressed as botanicalchemy.
I love that there is still so much to learn in this practice and, among other things, am presently researching safe and simple means of applying mordants for practitioners working in small spaces, with a view to offering the outcomes as a course at the School of Nomad Arts.
I make things to hang on walls, drape over beds and enfold bodies, taking particular delight in free-cutting garments and creating zero-waste shapes. For a while, I even supplied a store in Hollywood with one-off dresses that were re-constructed almost entirely from thrift-store finds. These days I would rather teach people to make their own, that way they can adjust the fit to suit their bodies and experience the joy of dyeing their clothes with local colour, while saving me the trouble of having to remind the shop for payment, bearing the expense of shipping to the store, paying my agent to “inspect the goods” and then (in one instance) finding that the store had documented me as an employee (!!!), presumably to save themselves some kind of import tax. Bizarre.
Being somewhat neurodivergent, stitching into patterned cloth unsettles me so I continue to sew all of my objects before they are dyed, setting white stitch to white cloth-like tracks across a snowy landscape before making what can only be described as a leap of faith and bundling the item with leaves to be either boiled or steamed, depending on the desired outcome.
In between making larger things, I weave from the shreds, fragments and moth-eaten morsels that have found their way to the studio floor. I imagine myself weaving a river and include silk, wool, linen and even hanji paper as my weft. I consider the entire farm as my studio (the indoor space is used primarily to record video lessons for the School of Nomad Arts) and take the most recent woven length out into the fields, draping it across rocks and mordanting it in puddles and buckets of rusty water. The leaves are collected on a quiet walk, the pot heated over a fire made with windfall sticks gathered from under the trees.*
*I get a lot of good exercise from gathering twigs. The smallest ones burn brightest and with the most heat, so I use a twig fire to bring the pot to a boil, then add a few more substantial pieces to keep the heat going steadily for a while. So long as the oxygen-to- fuel ratio is managed carefully and the wood is dry, you can have a virtually smokeless fire that generates no more pollutants than if the twigs had been permitted to rot under the trees from which they fell.
After it has cooled down again, I take the unwrapped piece back to the rocks, to contemplate the singeing together of the colours. I find it deeply satisfying to build cloth line by line, and then place myself unreservedly in the hands of the plant spirits, to accept whatever is offered.
Where to from here, then? I’m two years into my five-year plan to realise a youthful ambition to build a house of my own design within sight of the sea, where I will have better water security, will be closer to services as various bits of me start coming loose, and can concentrate on growing a perfumed garden rather than shepherding sheep and grubbing up thistles (I’m leaving those tasks to my eldest daughter), with a view to exploring the fragrance of place in addition to creating prints from gathered plants. I have invested in several intriguing alembic contraptions, am slowly learning the art of distilling and will be planting my new patch with trees and flowers carefully selected for their particular aromatic properties.
There is stitching still to be done, at least two books yet to write, a commission to make costumes for contemporary dance glimmering on the horizon — and whatever life is left to embrace wholeheartedly with open arms.
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PHOTO BY VALENTINA POPOVA, WWW.NAUA.MYPORTFOLIO.COM
I was fortunate to have been born to two fascinating people who had arrived in Australia with their families as refugees from the mid-century war in Europe and met at university.
My father was a scientist and musician who had studied both piano and violin to concert standard and (among other things) had built himself a telescope from an old brass shell casing, grinding the lenses by hand and building the supporting tripod from salvaged timber.
My mother was an artist, poet and dreamer who wove cloth in traditional Latvian patterns; designed and knitted us complicated snowflake-patterned ski sweaters; and made our ceramic dinnerware herself. The three generous bowls that held the “starch, protein and vegetable matter” in the centre of the table for distribution onto our plates were marvellously glazed so that there was a veneer of midnight ocean hues along with clear areas that allowed the rich red of the terracotta clay to shine through. I loved those bowls, and though they were destroyed in a bushfire along with our home, their colours and forms remain strong in my memory.
Though so different, my parents shared many interests, among them language (both German and Latvian were spoken in our home) and gardening; creating magical green places in which my childish imagination could run wild. Pa raised trees from collected seeds, grafted multiple fruit varieties together before it became fashionable and grew splendid vegetables. He was also an early guerrilla gardener, quietly planting indigenous tree species into vacant public places.
My mother filled any available space in our garden with flowers and had a particular passion for roses. She could grow chrysanthemum plants from a single stolen leaf and spent her summers putting up preserves, making jam and cooking cordials to help us through winter. If she sat down to rest, she would pick up her embroidery. Mama also sewed all our clothes (even shirts for Pa). It was not until I became a grumpy teenager that I was permitted a pair of jeans.
Tilly, Queen of Filth, inspecting the work.
Each Easter, Mama would gather herbs from the kitchen garden along with strawberry and clover leaves and dried grasses (to use as a resist) and we would sit down together at the kitchen table, carefully layering the fresh offerings inside dampened onion shells before resting an egg in the middle and then tying the whole thing up with thread, much as a spider might tie up their lunch.
It is a tradition that pre-dates Christianity and has been handed down the Latvian side of my family for as long as anyone can remember.
The bundling took place on the Saturday of the Easter weekend. The eggs were then placed in a pot with the leftover onion shells for good measure and brought to a simmer for 20 minutes or so before the heat was turned off and the strange stew allowed to cool while we shared a modest meal of tea and toast (leaving room for Sunday feasting). When the table had been cleared again, we would unwrap the eggs, marvelling at the prints on each one.
After drying, we would buff them with a greasy bacon rind, which made the eggs fairly glow. The onion-dyed thread would be care- fully wound onto paper spools for later use in embroidery or for crocheting lace edges onto handkerchiefs. Nothing was ever wasted, and my parents only bought something if they couldn’t make it themselves.
Small wonder that I grew up fascinated by plants and with a leaning toward the creative arts. My particular passion was for architecture and the design of spaces for living (which might also have been genetic, as my paternal great-grandfather was an architect). Sadly, my somewhat volatile (and regrettably immature) temper led me to abandon my studies before achieving a degree. In retrospect, I can see that I would not have taken kindly to a client wanting to interfere in my grand designs either, so perhaps it was for the best.
Happily, now in my 65th year, I am at last realising the long-held dream of designing my own home, to be built within sight of the sea, a project in which the only client to disagree with will be me.
But back to the story at hand. I was introduced to natural dyes by my maternal grandmother, who would use the leftover onion brew to tone down some of the more luridly printed cloth remnants she would bring home from the markets. But it was not until my late 20s that I commenced experimenting with bundling pieces of cloth (instead of eggs) with leaves and onion shells.
Recalling the joys of childhood potion-making, I also began to brew plant dyes, extracting them by slow steeping and then watching the colours deepen and change as the liquids were warmed and given time in vessels made of different metals (stainless steel, copper, iron and brass). My first explorations were with culinary herbs, then weeds, and eventually with eucalypts.
The genus eucalyptus is endemic to Australia and was a particular favourite of my father’s, who took us into old forests at any opportunity, 50 years before “forest bathing” became a fashionable divertisement.
I was raised on stories about the work of the eucalyptologist Ferdinand von Mueller, who also experimented with plant dyes but never unlocked the secret of the brilliant colours possible from the trees he loved above all others. Eucalypts are fascinating in that the dyes they contain undergo an alchemical change when the leaves are boiled for a period of time. It still seems miraculous to me that a blue-grey leaf can release a rich gold liquid that can dye a sample of cream-coloured wool a luminous rust red.
I have on several occasions been accused of misappropriating cultural knowledge by persons who are adamant that Australia’s First Nation people were familiar with the eucalyptus ecoprint, but I am confident this is not so. Sustaining the temperature required to boil water for 45 minutes (the minimum required to extract those red shades) is only possible in metal containers,* and given that their woven textiles (with the exception of fur, hair and feather belts) were made from cellulose/bast fibres, which respond to eucalyptus colour very differently than wool or silk, the only possibility might have been a cold leaf print (which would take months under a heavy weight) on a scraped animal skin.
*Australia’s first people were a stone culture, rather than a metal-based one, so I hold to my theory that these dyes were not known by them in the form we use them today.
There is certainly evidence of drawing on the insides of possum-skin cloaks using inks and paints, but none has been found yet of leaf prints.
When I eventually wrapped eucalyptus leaves in wool, way back in October of 1991, and boiled the bundle, I was astonished by the result. Initially, I considered the print more as a sustainable means of testing eucalypts for dye colour than as surface decoration in itself, but I was soon seduced by the ability to create unique and poetic cloths that spoke of the country in which they were dyed.
Thirty-two years (and several books and a master’s degree) later, I am still under the spell of this seemingly magical process that only requires leaves, water, heat and a protein (or suitably mordanted cellulose) substrate, along with a healthy dose of patience. It was not until 1998 that I gave it the name ecoprint, letting myself be guided by lichenologist Karen Diadick Casselman who had some years previously named her own approach to plant colour “ecodye.”*
*These days the two appellations are frequently confused or interchanged, but “ecodye” refers to the practice of dyeing solid colours using minimal mordants, while “ecoprint” is a contact print from plant matter.
It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of name, as many others who have adopted the practice now use toxic mordants along with barrier layers of plastic when making bundles: hardly ecologically sustainable.
For a while I considered calling it “eucaprint,” but as the technique can be performed (with cooking times and methods adjusted depending on the delicacy of the plant) with almost any form of vegetation, that made no sense. Bocoprint would be a snappy choice, but lacks the romance of the process, really best described as botanical alchemy and compressed as botanicalchemy.
I love that there is still so much to learn in this practice and, among other things, am presently researching safe and simple means of applying mordants for practitioners working in small spaces, with a view to offering the outcomes as a course at the School of Nomad Arts.
I make things to hang on walls, drape over beds and enfold bodies, taking particular delight in free-cutting garments and creating zero-waste shapes. For a while, I even supplied a store in Hollywood with one-off dresses that were re-constructed almost entirely from thrift-store finds. These days I would rather teach people to make their own, that way they can adjust the fit to suit their bodies and experience the joy of dyeing their clothes with local colour, while saving me the trouble of having to remind the shop for payment, bearing the expense of shipping to the store, paying my agent to “inspect the goods” and then (in one instance) finding that the store had documented me as an employee (!!!), presumably to save themselves some kind of import tax. Bizarre.
Being somewhat neurodivergent, stitching into patterned cloth unsettles me so I continue to sew all of my objects before they are dyed, setting white stitch to white cloth-like tracks across a snowy landscape before making what can only be described as a leap of faith and bundling the item with leaves to be either boiled or steamed, depending on the desired outcome.
In between making larger things, I weave from the shreds, fragments and moth-eaten morsels that have found their way to the studio floor. I imagine myself weaving a river and include silk, wool, linen and even hanji paper as my weft. I consider the entire farm as my studio (the indoor space is used primarily to record video lessons for the School of Nomad Arts) and take the most recent woven length out into the fields, draping it across rocks and mordanting it in puddles and buckets of rusty water. The leaves are collected on a quiet walk, the pot heated over a fire made with windfall sticks gathered from under the trees.*
*I get a lot of good exercise from gathering twigs. The smallest ones burn brightest and with the most heat, so I use a twig fire to bring the pot to a boil, then add a few more substantial pieces to keep the heat going steadily for a while. So long as the oxygen-to- fuel ratio is managed carefully and the wood is dry, you can have a virtually smokeless fire that generates no more pollutants than if the twigs had been permitted to rot under the trees from which they fell.
After it has cooled down again, I take the unwrapped piece back to the rocks, to contemplate the singeing together of the colours. I find it deeply satisfying to build cloth line by line, and then place myself unreservedly in the hands of the plant spirits, to accept whatever is offered.
Where to from here, then? I’m two years into my five-year plan to realise a youthful ambition to build a house of my own design within sight of the sea, where I will have better water security, will be closer to services as various bits of me start coming loose, and can concentrate on growing a perfumed garden rather than shepherding sheep and grubbing up thistles (I’m leaving those tasks to my eldest daughter), with a view to exploring the fragrance of place in addition to creating prints from gathered plants. I have invested in several intriguing alembic contraptions, am slowly learning the art of distilling and will be planting my new patch with trees and flowers carefully selected for their particular aromatic properties.
There is stitching still to be done, at least two books yet to write, a commission to make costumes for contemporary dance glimmering on the horizon — and whatever life is left to embrace wholeheartedly with open arms.
The Women Create Foundation is a catalyst for small but significant strides to empower women creators through grants that help bring projects to life and foster innovation.
