pied midden: issue no.22 : a council of ochres: heidi gustafson

ochre spiral-rider

The entirety of this newsletter is dedicated to an interview/dialogue between me and ochre expert/cosmic spiral-rider Heidi Gustafson. Heidi’s work protecting and archiving ochre has been featured in The New York Times, American Craft, China's Life Magazine, Colossal, The Side View and in several other publications. There are few people involved in pigment foraging and paint-making who have not been touched by the wisdom and beauty Heidi perpetually generates and shares. There are also many of us who have traded rocks with Heidi, or sent her pebbles and dusts from our home places! I can’t think of a better guardian for the prismatic coalition of hundreds of stones and vials of lambent soil that is the Ochre Sanctuary.

I met Heidi and her partner-in-pigment-mischief, artist-researcher-vivianite-expert Melonie Ancheta, on March 1st, 2019, as I was poised to launch Wild Pigment Project. I had no idea then, as I drove up to rainy northern Washington, what an adventure of friendship, learning and collaboration I was in for. Two and a half years later, the three of us are co-organizers of the first-ever international Pigments Revealed Symposium, the manifestation of a dream that Melonie has been nurturing for decades. Watching our incredible list of speakers grow, our panels form and share ideas, and the submissions to the online exhibition roll in has made us giddy with glee. It’s really happening.

In our different ways, all three of us have worked to build thriving networks of pigment-passionate people that span the planet and foster inspiring projects and exchanges. The symposium brings this lacework of mycelial interconnections together in one “place” for the first time. What will happen! We can’t wait.

In the midst of the intensity of international conversations, zooming, and email marathons that we’ve been dancing with for months, Heidi and I found time to sneak in this interview, just before she disappeared for a couple weeks to the bottom of a colorful canyon somewhere. It’s a huge honor and treat to share this conversation with you.

WPP: You speak often of the dream that led you to an important damaged sacred ochre site in what is now a strip mall and condo in California. The dream and the events that followed it seem, in a sense, to have been your initiation into being what you would come to describe as an “ochre whisperer.”

I’m interested in your creative life before this era. What sorts of creative projects were you involved in pre-Early Futures? Do you see connections between what you were doing before ochre and what you do now?

HG: Oooo fun question! I do see threads and connection: making spaces, open collaboration, shared experience and curiosity about what happens in all the marginal areas between the tangible and intangible (matter and psyche, imagination and substance, etc). Altering organs of perception. Relationship, friendship, differentiation. What exactly is real? And who cares?

After art school, I lived in Baltimore for a decade, and did a lot of projects around domestic life, very young children, and taught at a Baltimore city preschool. I was beyond blessed to co-teach and be mentored by the legendary teacher, Winnie Faye Thomas, a black and Indigenous woman who grew up in Baltimore City and taught kindergarten for 30+ years there. She’s one of my heroes and dear friends. We collaborated on a book project, What We Know About Being Here, where four and five year olds talked to us about real unanswerable shit that we all think about. We documented what the children said and published it (you can read it online). In fact, that’s when the term Early Futures, as a framework for my projects now, arose – it was originally honoring this work with the insight and intelligence of young urban children.

Some other projects:

+ I learned how to build a boathouse and a two person, 32’ foot wooden elite rowing scull without any training and fell in love with the man I built it with. Romantic architecture!

+ Made an underground dining/eating project, called “Sometimes” with several friends, out of my ghetto-palm and stinkhorn mushroom filled backyard on the weekends. People donated a few bucks and we made weird, several course meals of whatever we wanted to serve them.

+ My spiritual bff Steven Goodman and I did a project where we brought together Tibetan and Ugaritic ritual texts on making offerings to mountains, and innermost insides. That culminated in a talk called Conjuring Deities – you can watch it online.

+ Several other of my older projects are online at earlyfutures.com/about.

I guess, in sum, I care about acts of making space for exchange and innate, everyday, wisdom to emerge. And right now, that’s a lotta wisdom from ochres – they know a lot about the everyday life of Earth.

*Ochre Sanctuary wall. Image courtesy of Heidi Gustafson.*

WPP: Oh. My. What. I just checked out What We Know About Being Here. Now I know the answer to the last question in this interview!!!*** These kinder-wisdoms are phenomenal: “My opinion is that in the darkness of death everything is possible. It means you can do every single thing” and “Everyone believed in the love, because it was their favorite thing they always remembered.” and “Pain’s home is in mom’s stomach.” !!! It makes so much sense to me that the ‘Early Futures’ framework had seeds in your experiences with Winnie Faye Thomas and these incredible child people and their visionary talk.

My fresh-out-of-art-school time was also an immersion in collaborations with kids, through a printed magazine called All Round “for children ages 1 to 100 and up” that called out ageism and championed sensory wisdom. The ongoing story in the mag was about a family of “Soul Transporters” who lived in a floating Victorian farmhouse, invisible from Earth. The family rounded up souls who had drifted out of their bodies, took them to places like redwood groves, dusky firefly-lit fields, and ochreous mountains (!) to “recharge” so they could find their way back to their people-bodies. My favorite part of the whole project, which lasted for six years and ended up with a circulation of 16,000, was what I called “contests” — where readers were invited to mail in drawings, and I printed every one of them in a big shimmery grid. The very first contest was DRAW YOUR SOUL.

When I stopped making the magazine, which was a collaboration with my excellent poet-dad, I wrapped things up with the magazine’s fictional family by making a book about Jakes, the main character, called ‘How To Eat Color & Paint Who You Are.’ The book’s formation brought me back to wild pigments, which I had explored in college but not pursued. Jakes, the main character, paints only with plant and stone pigments, brought to her from Earth by her dad, who occasionally descends for supplies on a long terrifying rope ladder. The final images in the book, which are drawings made by Jakes of her soul, are painted with actual plant and rock dusts, and Jakes explains how to make paint with eggs and kitchen powders. When I finished illustrating the book, I put all my synthetic watercolors away and soon had my own copy of “Colors From The Earth,” the generous classic by Ann Wall Thomas that opened the door to foraging and paint-making for me.

So…. we have these little parallel filaments running in our destinies…from kids and their ancient magics to the ability of found dusts to make the world new….

Ok, next question! What was your next step after connecting with the destroyed ochre site? When did you know you wanted to establish the Ochre Sanctuary?

HG: Well, it wasn’t, isn’t, an instant, or permanent, connection -- it’s an ongoing relationship with an ancient living being. It took me years to really start to know that ochre in that place, and it feels like any relationship, subject to ongoing participation. Stop offering and going there, and connection becomes lost. Or think of it like a rare mushroom: ochre too can hide for a long time and pop into consciousness only for a brief interlude, of which, without seasonally appropriate interaction and deep attention, we miss the bloom. Currently I am learning how to connect more closely and support the current Indigenous Ohlone land back movements there.

The Ochre Sanctuary actually came before all that dream stuff – it’s what’s in the heart of my work.

It’s a place with a lot of ochres doing special stuff I don’t really know about. It’s like a soul – Ochre’s? I don’t know. What I do know: I encountered it way earlier, in the ‘pre-aware’ ochre days, in a visioning experience. But the later dream helped me establish a connection in this world and make it tangible. When I moved from California back to my birthplace in the North Cascades, that’s when the Ochre really started to ask me to step into the work more fully…. So I guess you could say, it established itself, when I went back to the land I’m from.

*Sanctuary ochres. Image courtesy of Heidi Gustafson.*

WPP: How did you describe the Sanctuary — to yourself, and to potential participants — in the early days? Did you know then that it would grow into its current form, a nourishing place for hundreds of ochres from all over the world?

HG: I think it was more like “I’m so in love with that earth I see on the ground in your Instagram photo, or in your research article, would you be able to please send me some to hang out with??”

I mostly stuck with the image I am shown in my minds-eye, or my hearts-eye: thousands of mineral ochres that “make everything”, in a columbarium-esque space where people come and move through and experience ochre shining forth as itself.

I do remember talking to my friend Morgan Williams (a soil scientist, toxic land healer) a few years back, and we kind of came to the term ‘ochre archive,’ to describe the image in my soul in an easy way for others to digest. Maybe ochre ‘lymph node’ would’ve also been more appropriate?

WPP: Has it been at all challenging to receive pigments through the mail? Are there any people who would like to send you pigments but haven’t been able to?

HG: The postal people are angels! The process is really pretty amazing and I’ve lucked out with very few challenges thus far. Other then postal mail, often I am given ochres directly into my hand. They come by way of someone, by way of someone else, in a longer chain of exchange, especially where postal mail is unreliable. There are people who would like to offer ochres, but it’s best to receive them hand to hand, or through a more intimate exchange of personal meeting, so I wait until that time comes, if possible. There are a lot of places where it is also just too expensive to ship (and I am not able to afford to pay for it yet).

WPP: Ditto the postal people as angels. They play huge roles in collaboration for both of us. And long live the Global Stamp — perfect for small packets of dust! Wish there was a larger version of it so more rocks could fly around.

Beholding your gorgeous arrays of ochres combined in all their exquisite majesty has inspired a multitude of humans to connect with ochres. What sort of responses to your work have touched you?

HG: The specifics feel too intimate or private to really willy-nilly share – but I will say, on a general level, that is the part that exactly touches me. I experience an empathy shift in people when they are around ochre. Their voice softens. Something in them drops down. Something in them rises into the air. There’s a sort of alchemization of soul that occurs. This touches me, and feels affirming, especially on days when the darker shadows of ochre takes on its harder ore form.

WPP: Yeah, I witnessed that in the group when I joined you for guided foraging and ochre communing in 2019. It was amazing to watch everyone go through the shift you’re describing. It was not just a walk on the beach. I’ve felt that kind of feeling around ochres since I was a kid but I didn’t see it in anyone around me and really had no way of truly understanding it until I met you.

Your Ochre Sanctuary is decidedly not a “collection.” How do “collections” differ from what you do?

HG: Well, for one thing, it’s more like a hoard. I anticipate a lot of future loss and like any good hoarder, I hold onto where I feel the call of life force. Jane Bennet has some great talks on this, and a book, Vibrant Matter.

But more simply: ochres aren’t things, so they can’t really be “collected.” They are dynamic and in geomorphic process just like the rest of us. As soon as you say “collection,” it implies a form of homogenized or centralized control or domination.

Perhaps it’s easier to think of it more like a collective: ochre as several wisdom energies, non-humans with agency and autonomy, behaviors. My making space for them to be together is an act, much less of collecting, and more of an act of allowing for their own secretive, collective ion exchange. But even that feels not quite right. Maybe, and admittedly more romantically, I think of it as an ancestral counsel convening from all around the planet?

In that way, I am sort of behind-the-scenes of this place where the ochres come together – they aren’t here to stay, they seem to communicate when they need to move on, I don’t hide them away to go comatose in a storage box, and I don’t work with or organize them in a uniform way. I most certainly have very little control over what happens.

WPP: Starting when I was fifteen, I had a series of ochre-related experiences that were really powerful. I visited several special ochre sites — in France, Australia, and Arizona — and felt urgently “called” — filled with a sense of alignment and purpose and home-landing. I just really, really wanted to be near these places! It’s taken until fairly recently for me to integrate these experiences and feel into what they were all about, partly because I wasn’t sure how I could personally find a place to relate to ochre, which I recognized as a sacred part of many Indigenous cultures. Talking with you about my experiences, and learning from you has been very supportive. Do you have suggestions for how people can listen more deeply to ochres, especially when they’ve felt this sort of resonance?

HG: Yea…. What was your hesitation and what shifted over those fifteen years? I know you and I have also talked about how important your other tendrils were in coaxing you back to being with ochre, namely the less iron-saturated wonders (green earths and purple soils, etc.). Maybe you could say more about that?

As far as I know, when experiencing a resonance with ochre somewhere, the most important thing is to participate exactly in the place and at the pace that is asked of you, and to do the work to feel that. Usually that means – know when to go home. Do your homework. Home. Work. ie. do you actually care about Earth? Or maybe that means you need to actually leave your house and experience ochre in unexpected places (like ditches!).

Then what? I’d say use all the resources available to you – from any realm. Local folks. Dreams. Memories. The dead. Stories you’ve heard a million times and are sick of. Boredom. Graffiti tags. Impulses. Random directions overheard on the street. Road signs. Learn to read the landscape in a non-English language of which you speak (rustling? orchids? footprints? ladybugs?). Earth is sacred, and thus, of course, ochre places are ‘sacred’ – that is to say, amazing acts of mortal continuity -- places that support our personal and cultural memories and futures and are endowed with human and Indigenous cultural protectors, invisible ancestral beings and other non-human protectors guarding them (plants, insects, spirits).

It’s really important to say that ochre is not for everyone. Just like any craft or skill, there are specialists for a reason. Working with ochre may be dangerous – iron hangs out with a lot of toxic places, and can absorb all kinds of heavy metals and lots of untamed spiritual beings too. In N. America it is esp. hard, and takes you to a lot of fucking depressing, sad, weird wastelands – especially in your own soul, and especially, the soul of colonial descendants, as you and I are.

If not worked with right, ochre’s root element, iron, will make you lose your mind. Literally! That’s a whole other thing. Google “iron-accumulation in the brain.” Feel free to quote me on this in a few years when I don’t remember who any of you are….JK.

So. I often think finding your way into earth color is really personal for each of us. And soil-based earth pigments and seasonal-based, botanical pigments – spent flowers and food waste especially – are often a beautiful, sustainable natural pigment for most folks to work with.

WPP: Iron’s not for everyone! Yeah, that’s so true. Thinking about it more, my reaction to my ochre-place longings actually emphasizes, to me, the difference between relating to iron when it’s in a landscape versus relating to rocks held in the hand, separated from place, or at least, carried away from their places of origin, and brought closer in to the body. I think I can relate to red, brown and orange ochres — high iron content ochres — most when they’re in huge swaths that I can walk over with bare feet. There’s something there about being in the full-on presence of the earth in those places. Nothing is hidden by plants or concealed with concrete: it’s like looking straight at the face of the planet. And what you say is true: if you’re going to stare straight into someone’s eyes, you have to be ready to see what’s there.

To gather this ochre in a way that feels good, I think you really need to know what you want to do with it, or a sense of distance and vagueness can form, at least for me.

Red ochre pigments remind me of how I’ve felt at sacred ochre sites, of the longings I have there — longings to stay, to never “go home” — to just be home, there. That longing is similar to the longing I feel everyday, a longing to live before (or after!) cars, massive-scale extractive mining, light pollution, industrial agriculture…to breathe the dark of real darkness and have a respite from the sounds of motors. I feel so good in the tiny moments when I have less of all that in my immediate surrounds — but (right now, at least) there’s no way to really leave it. The best I can do, I’m learning, is to let myself feel the grief of not being able to go home to it, as well as the grief of being part of a genetic lineage of colonizer capitalists who have done horrific acts of violence to so many other humans and interspecies communities. Until recently, I didn’t understand that sharing this grief with other people is actually the best way get back “home.” It’s the beginning of being able to act in accordance with my heart.

Another thought about me and red ochres: white culture — and especially American white culture — seems to have very little relationship with ochre. Not surprising, for a culture that doesn’t honor the earth! I grew up seeing ochre present in a lot of First Nations art, and I associated it with cultural practices that weren’t my own. So I think when it came time to make paint with earth and rocks, I didn’t want to appropriate, and I gravitated towards mineral greens, pinks and purples, which don’t seem to be used much in anyone’s art, not even in ancient petroglyphs, which rarely depict plant beings or spirits.

I sought out greens also because trees are a focus for me, in paintings and in general. Trees are cradles that I can always disappear up into, green universes still connected to the human world under their boughs. Little escapes, big siblings.

Last question: I know you plan to touch on this in your upcoming presentation at the Pigments Revealed Symposium in June (which you and I have had the honor to assist Melonie Ancheta in organizing!), but if you don’t mind giving us a little peek here, what are some possible plans for you and the Ochre Sanctuary in coming times? Are there any ways you would particularly like to invite participation from interested folks?

HG: The Symposium is gonna slayyyy!!! Yay!!!!

The Ochre Sanctuary and archive is a durational, long-term project, and I’m in a sort of rough draft of it right now. I am very much still receiving and requesting ochres be sent to participate and be exchanged from all over!! Please feel welcome to contribute!! If you have some ochre or work with it (or aren’t sure if what you work with is ochre) and want to make an offering, get in touch with me and we can work it out and I’ll send the snail mail address! If you work with ochre and want to learn more, or share together in a protected or private way, please reach out by email or on my DM in instagram. I am very open to sharing knowledge and conversation with anyone who needs to protect ochre places and uses, especially ones that may be threatened. Send images. Ask questions. I'm here to be a support with, and especially for, ochre.

Basically, long-term, the Ochre place will be an actual architecture place somewhere on Earth that people can trek to, not unlike a temple built into a rock. I get the sense it will eventually be structured like an underground middle-eastern columbarium and tower. There’s a lot still in progress and that I’m still learning from the ochres. Who knows. Maybe I will build it, more ochres will come, it’ll do benefit, and someday there will be an earthquake and all the rocks will fall down on top of me and bury me like a big cairn and my bones will turn into pure vivianite. That’d be kind of a perfect offering to a little rainbow hidey hole….

WPP: (oh, wait, a last-last a question from my partner Noelle: how the fuck did you get so cool?? )

HG: hahahahah am I supposed to really answer that????

WPP: I think you have, many times over, Heidi! You've got the answers written all over your giant nickle-iron heart. <3

That’s it!

Submit your pigment-relevant art to the online symposium exhibit! This is an opportunity to see and be seen by the global pigment community, to cross pollinate and celebrate together. And, it’s a totally open-call exhibition! All submission are accepted! Go here to submit right nnnnow! There’s zero reason not to.

Also: we really really hope to see you at the Pigments Revealed Symposium. If you haven’t yet heard, we’ve added a $100 option to the sliding scale, and you can watch the entire four days of pigment-packed, Master Class-level material at your leisure because the entire thing will be recorded. We’re giving as many scholarships out as possible, prioritizing BIPOC applicants and students, and, we’re paying for everything (turns out it’s pretty ‘pensive to run an online conference!) with registration fees alone, so…. if you think we’re doing something good and important that will bring us all joy for many years to come, registering for the event is the absolute best way to support this.

I do so love to hear from you, so if this convo sparked anything for you, feel free to drop me a line. You can reply directly to this email, or write me at info@wildpigmentproject.org.

Stay Collective,

<3 Tilke

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pied midden: issue no.22 : a council of ochres: heidi gustafson