bearded iris : june ’23
The two blue squares of cloth that make up this month’s pigment are called “ink clothlets.” Clothlets are an ingenious way to carry ink in your pocket, in dried form, and were used by medieval European manuscript illuminators to store colors used as transparent stains, which were immensely popular at one time. Mixed with a small quantity of a mineral powder called alum, presoaked in the clothlets, the iris ink, which is originally purple, turns blue. Artist and Wild Pigment Project founding director Tilke Elkins has dreamed of offering an iris clothlet contribution since Ground Bright began in 2019. Tilke gathered the iris flower heads for this contribution over a two year period — picking hundreds of flower heads in a number of generous neighbours’ gardens and freezing them. Happily, bearded irises produce a flower nearly every day from a collection of buds on their stalks. Each one of these clothlets holds about three or four flowers’ worth of pure petal liquid essence, dipped and dried three times in the ink.
contributor: Tilke Elkins
Tilke Elkins is an artist focused on site-specificpainting. Tilke has worked with mineral and botanical pigments since 2007, and is the founding director of Wild Pigment Project. In 2022, her work was exhibited at form & concept gallery in Santa Fe, NM) along with a Wild Pigment Project group exhibition she curated. In summer 2023, a version of the group show was exhibited at the NMSU Museum in Las Cruces, NM. Ground Bright was featured in the summer 2023 issue of American Craft Magazine. www.tilkeelkins.com
Image courtesy of Noel Guetti.