pied midden, issue no.2 : amberat & explosive alchemy

Originally published June 26, 2019

what's in a midden?

Middens interest me as elements of the landscape that can go unrecognized. As in, “That huge hill over there? It’s actually a several-thousand-years-old pile of oyster shells!” Middens compress, protect, and offer back gems. Take amberat, for example, also known as ‘ratite.’ If you’ve ever come across a towering mound of sticks wedged between trees in the forest, or cave walls in the desert, you may have discovered the work of the woodrat, aka packrat. Woodrats use their own pee to cement their middens, which contain all manner of goodies including bones, dung, plant fragments, and anything shiny. The rat urine crystallizes into a hard, durable, amber-like material that accumulates with every generation and can perfectly preserve human artifacts, seeds, pollen, and so on for up to 50,000 years. Amberat’s usefulness as a pigment is questionable — apologies to those who were teased by my IG suggestion that woodrats have anything at all to do with pigment use. The association here is purely peripheral, as far as I know... 

but, speaking of rats

 Like the stuff of middens (the daisies above are flourishing atop what was once the town dump, btw), the term “pied” has all but been chucked into a linguistic waste basket these days, but I still favor it as one of the few short words that indicates a multitude of colors. And while I haven’t heard anyone say ‘pied’ since the fairy tale about the slighted child-stealer was part of my life, I have noticed that people who devote themselves to pigment gathering use the word ‘midden’—a lot. Whether referring to collecting sites, their own little constellations of pigment piles, or in metaphorical usage, ‘midden’ is never far from the discussion.

Pigment workers are used to uncovering rich and hidden colorants in overlooked places, often in areas assigned to waste. Artist and ochre expert Heidi Gustafson released a pigment series this very week called CLIMATES OF CHANGE that includes the soil of a wildflower field that was buried under the asphalt of a car part supply shop, and the ashes of a great tree cut for Washington lumber. Scott “Pigment Hunter” Sutton’s WOAD WARRIOR project remediates Southern Oregon ecosystems by culling invasive woad plants, and using the plant material for indigo.  Jason Logan of The Toronto Ink Company gleans pigment from fragments of decaying urban infrastructure, and Thomas Little, a mystic~chemist, alchemizes old guns into ink.

Middens are, as it turns out, not trash heaps, but sacred time capsules. And pigment needn’t be just color — for many, it’s a ritual substance that connects abstraction (the idea of ‘color’) to substance, to place, to its past and its future. The culture that commodifies the interspecies community has separated the idea of color from the physicality of pigment, leaving a brilliance stripped bare of meaning. Similarly, signs of the vast and venerable history of the cultures that have occupied North America since before the last Ice Age have been nearly washed out of the landscape in the last couple hundred years.

One way to return these histories to the land is to support organizations working to heal the trauma of the attempted erasure by building strong communities rooted in culture and land stewardship. 


ground, bright?

With this in mind, Wild Pigment Project is pleased to announce… (drum roll…) GROUND BRIGHT, a pigment-of-the-month subscription. Each month, you get a different botanical or mineral pigment in the mail, gathered, prepared and generously donated by an artist-forager luminary (check out the line-up below!). 

GROUND BRIGHT's proceeds go to supporting the endeavors of Wild Pigment Project, and that’s not all (whip out your cheesiest monster-truck-ad voice for this one…): a full 22% of each month’s proceeds go to a land stewardship organization chosen by the pigment artist featured that month.  You get twelve utterly unique pigments a year, pigment artists direct funds to cultural and ecological stewardship, and WPP receives what it needs to keep on chuggin’. It’s a win-win-WIN. And it's only $11/month! Subscribe here. International subscribers are welcome!  

guns to grind

JULY's Pigment-o’-the-Month is Wild Pigment Project’s own WHILAMUT RIVER ROCK. These rock-people presented themselves after the spring floods, and resemble a prairie's middle distance when dry and mossy shadows when wet. Their lightened shade (when you add a white pigment of your choice) is a move towards the hue of a calcium-rich glacial lake. The Kommema Cultural Protection Association, which promotes Kalapuya culture, will be the recipient of the 22% for this first month’s intake. 

Subscribers can clap their hands in gleeful anticipation of these other up-coming pigments:

AUGUST: Heidi Gustafson of Early Futures shares a glorious mixed-state iron ochre from her teaching site in Northern California, and plans to donate her 22% to the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland. 

SEPTEMBER: Melonie Ancheta of Native Paint Revealed has a special, surprise pigment in mind ~ donations will help support her pigment analysis work with Haida and Tlingit artifacts.

OCTOBER: Thomas Little of A Rural Inkworks is transmuting gun barrels into beautiful iron-rich pigment, a stunning metamorphosis echoed by his choice of donation recipient Lead to Life, an organization that works sheer magic, melting down guns and forging the ore into shovels used to plant trees in areas of gun violence. 

Scott ‘Pigment Hunter’ Sutton has big plans for a Persicaria tinctoria dry pigment for November, and pigment artists in Canada and Scotland are dreaming their contributions for the fall/winter into being as I write.

Even if you don’t subscribe, you can look forward to hearing more about each GROUND BRIGHT feature in that month’s issue of Pied Midden. Videos, interviews and insights, the whole thing. There's also a lot more in store for you in coming issues! Find out next month who the first online exhibiting artist in the Palette Remediation series will be.  

A huge THANK YOU to all of you who have enthusiastically signed on to this project! It feels truly exciting, a new creature being born into this world with a whole slew of excellent parents. :)
 

Hey, are you into what PIED MIDDEN's got going on? I would LOVVVVVVE to hear from you. It would make my little heart glad to hear back from the void about this newsletter. Do write to me, Tilke Elkins, at info@wildpigmentproject.com. 

So, this is a picture of the once-daisy-patch between the Willamette River and my studio, taken yesterday. The shot at the top of the newsletter is the same spot 2016, when swallowtail butterfly season corresponded with the first yellowing big-leaf maple leaves of summer and the result was these ersatz "butterflies," (you gotta zoom in on the foreground up there to see them) painted with -- of course -- wild pigments. Things change!