pied midden : issue no.39 : wild pigments : tilke elkins

Dry grass, leaves and sculptural objects painted with wild pigments (buckthorn ink, pink and yellow ochres) in my studio. Photo: Tilke Elkins

wild pigments in the news

This month, I’ve had a couple of conversations with reporters interested in talking with me about wild pigments. You can read one of the resulting pieces, by Halle Parker, here — about the excellent work of two Louisiana artists, Hannah Chalew and Heather Bird Harris (who happens to be next month’s Ground Bright contributor!).

All this inspired me to get a few thoughts down in an essay that encapsulates my view of the WIld Pigment Project journey so far. If you’re new to all this, you might especially enjoy the read. If you’ve been with me for a while, you might appreciate the summary. If you’d like to cut the blah blah and go straight to the promised photo essay, you have my full encouragement! Just scroll down to ‘buckthorn pinke: a photo essay,’ about the January Ground Bright pigment. It was my turn to contribute.

what’s wild?

On Wild Pigments by Tilke Elkins

When I founded Wild Pigment Project in 2019, I chose the word “wild” very intentionally. Commonly, the word has been used to refer to what is unoccupied, beyond-the-human, untended, or disordered. With the understanding that the ancient land-tending activities of First Nations communities the world over have shaped many of the landscapes that dominant culture calls “wild,”  I reframe the word as referring to ‘any place where interspecies communities thrive, even when they do so in the presence of human activity.’ Wildness includes humans. Through this lens, wild places exist nearly everywhere, from vacant urban lots to remote mountaintops. Even our bodies, with their rich microbiomes, are wild places. 

What remains as not-wild, then, are materials stripped of their relationship with place and the diverse networks of beings in those places. Plastic, produced from petrochemicals extracted where few humans spend time, relay almost nothing of their provenance. To me, then, fresh-from-the-factory, industrial mineral and petroleum-based pigments — the paints, inks, and dyes that make up so much of the commercial color atmosphere — these are little more than abstractions; the idea of red, yellow, or blue in a tube. What I call ‘wild’ pigments, on the other hand, are found and gathered, at a specific time and place by a specific person, and remembered as part of a community of other beings. 

Birch bark I painted with a simple buckthorn-ochre paint. Photo: Tilke Elkins

Another reason I coined the term “wild pigments”*** was to provide an umbrella term for colorants that historically have been considered separate: mineral pigments, and natural dyes. In art-speak, the word ‘pigment’ applies specifically to dried, insoluble and very often mineral-based paint powders. Botanical colorants, which are for the most part soluble and used in aqueous suspensions, are considered dyes or inks. But since science thinks of the natural coloring matter of animal or plant tissue as ‘pigment,’  including dye plants in the ‘wild pigment’ category feels acceptable. Lake pigments, which are paints made essentially by fixing a plant dye to a neutral-hued mineral to produce an insoluble pigment that can be dried and used for paint, act as a bridge between painters and dyers working with foraged materials.

Central to this concept of “wild” is relationship, which is also the core subject of this project. Pigments are wild because they are still perceivably involved in relationships of all kinds. The project concerns itself with the observable, ecological relationships that any given pigment has to its place, but the unseen relationships are also of great interest. What histories are held in the land, both energetically and genetically? Whose feet passed over this soil, whose hands sowed the seeds of these plants’ ancestors, ten, twenty, two thousand years ago? Whose actual bones, whose DNA is held in this ground we scoop up and convert to paint, and why? Though initially invisible, these histories come into focus, through forming relationships with the players involved, through friendships, offerings, conversations, listening, and receiving.

Relationships form and are sustained not just through listening, and not solely through giving, but through reciprocity: accepting gifts and giving back. The concept of reciprocity is crucial to all sustainable human relationships with land. Of course, reciprocal dialogues between people and land around what I call wild pigments have been in place for hundreds of thousands of years, and continue to be nourished today. Ochres and plant dyes are key features of traditional Indigenous expression the world over, and the use of wild pigments in contemporary Indigenous art practice is gaining momentum. Indigenous artists Cannupa Hanska Luger, Athena LaTocha, and Ka’ila Farrell-Smith all showed work featuring mineral pigments, mostly foraged by the artists, in major exhibitions in 2022.

January Ground Bright tags. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

Reciprocity is built into the monthly pigment subscription, called ‘Ground Bright,’ that funds Wild Pigment Project. Each month, five and a half pounds of foraged or reclaimed pigment is given as a gift to the project by an artist with intimate personal connections to the place where the pigment originates. As a reciprocal offering to that place, the project gives 22% of the subscription profits to a cultural or land stewardship organization connected to that land base. Through an interview, published in the monthly newsletter, Pied Midden, the artist and I explore the cultural complexities of pigment gathering in the context of land histories and ecologies. Though commercial — money is exchanged for wild pigments through the subscription — the enterprise is limited by those five and a half pounds. 

What remains relevant, though, are questions about who can best decide to take from the land for profit, however small. A foraged stone or some leaves for personal use are one thing, but is five pounds too much? And is it fair to place the burden of these decisions on the individual who contributes the pigment? Humanity has been forced to face the devastating results of extractive global capitalism, a project that has, from the perspective of rapid global warming, mass extinction and widespread human hardship, failed.

In spite of the racism, violence and cultural genocide enacted by colonization and global imperialism, Indigenous nations have maintained cultures which recognize interspecies equity. These populations may be the ones best equipped to make decisions about who takes from the land. Too idealistic, you say? Foraged pigment, a very useful but inessential material, provides a widely accessible lens through which individuals like me can explore and enact our values. It’s virtually impossible not to buy into capitalism for basic needs, but when it comes to where to source paint materials, and how, we’re at choice.

My waste-stream palette, clockwise: iron oxide from rusted nails, eggshell white, pomegranate rind lake, blackberry vine charcoal, copper pipe blue, brick red. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

I’ve referred to pigments as “homeopathic doses of revolution” for the ethical microcosm they present.  A recent shift in my own thinking about my relationship with land through foraging has inspired me to move the focus for Ground Bright pigments from those foraged anywhere to those drawn specifically from ecological imbalances resulting from human activities, like iron oxide removed from waterways polluted by leaching abandoned coal mines, dyes from plants that reduce biodiversity, and ink made from guns pulled from the violence-stream. These materials, which result from a lack of comprehensive consideration for all beings, I view as my inherited responsibility to land.

Wild pigments are imbued with concentric circles of meaning that extend from the past and out into the future, from the personal to the ecological to the historic, to the visionary. From the special place on the riverbank shaded by cottonwoods where I picked up a dull crumbing green stone on the day I sought solace from heartbreak, to the family of otters that comes to that spot every night (known only to me by the mussel shells they leave behind), to the river’s transformations in response to damming and pollution, to the Kalapuyan alder-planked houses with doors that all faced the water that stood here almost within living memory, to the complicated relationships between settlers and Kalapuyans, and histories of genocide and erasure, to the new relationships forming to support the rematriation of Kalapuya ancestral lands and the publishing of a Kalapuyan dictionary. All these form a web of connections that radiates outwards from the green earth in my hand and the paint I make from it.

My own painting practice has evolved to move into greater relationships of reciprocity with this web. I work site-specifically in the place where I make plants and earths into inks and paints, applying those colors in ephemeral ways to refuse generated by humans that has made its way back into the landscape — weathered planks, dislodged concrete, wayward plywood siding worn smooth by wave action. Reclaiming these surfaces while spending time connecting with the interspecies communities they occupy, I paint on the place with the place. Painting is an activity that draws me closer to the land and allows me to ‘be with’ the many different beings and elements there: to observe, to be observed, to exchange thought-forms, to listen and be listened to. The painting is both a communication intended for other humans, and evidence of my participation in a moment of interspecies co-existence. The paint is dissolved by weather over time, and returns, as dust, to the the place it belongs to.

Section from Underlog II by me. Pigments for “rent,” to be returned to Kalapuya lands where they were foraged, with rent monies going to Cha Tumenma, a Kalapuya land rematriation project. Photo: form & concept.

These days, on the occasion that I do make paintings for sale, I sell the repurposed plywood boards or other flotsam that I paint on, but I offer the pigments that make up the painting for ‘rent’ only, forwarding the rent funds to the Indigenous communities with ancestral connections to the land where I gathered the pigments. At the agreed-upon time, I pay a visit to the buyer, and, using a technique drawn from many traditional ephemeral art practices, wash the pigments off the plywood, and return them to their places of origin. While washing away a painting or returning a hand-crafted object to the land may seem financially untenable, or even a sacrilege of sorts for many makers, I see an ever-spreading cultural hunger for artwork which invites participation in cycles of life and death.

‘Wild’ is a term that points to community. What does it mean, then, that this word is trending, appearing with increased vigor across many cultural contexts, from food, to fitness, to craft? I see it as a longing to step into community, to dig into ways to be included in the lives and life cycles of other beings. That which is wild cannot exist without this sort of community, for to dissolve the web of relationships is to remove the identity of wildness. By this definition, wildness evades commodification. It’s possible, of course, to show up badly, in any relationship, to offer little and take a lot, but it’s not possible to offer nothing. And in fact, as I’ve slowly come to understand through this project, the more that’s given, and received, the deeper and the more satisfying the experience of wildness becomes. There’s hope, for me, in that.

~ Tilke Elkins, 01.23

*** As far as I can tell, I coined the term “wild pigment” as I’ve defined it here, in 2019, with the founding of this project. I’m open to claims to the contrary. 

Much thanks to brilliant writer/ form & concept director Jordan Eddy for his help editing this essay!

buckthorn pinke: a photo jaunt by tilke elkins

Abanaki Nation of the Missisquoi territory not far from where the buckthorn berries for the January Ground Bright pigment, Buckthorn Pinke, were gathered. This month’s 22% goes to the Abanaki Nation of the Missisquoi community. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

My partner, the delightful Noelle Guetti, who helped pick the berries, looking pleased while posing with a buckthorn branch. Buckthorns rapidly replace much of the vegetation wherever they grow and they spread by birds eating their seeds, so each berry picked is one fewer possible buckthorn bush. Photo Tilke Elkins.

Buckthorn berries in the pot. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

I’ve always wanted to do this. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

It didn’t disappoint. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

Lots of seeds. Ph changed with addition of soda ash. The color will drift all the way from purple through green and coppery yellow, stopping at golden brown. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

Buckthorn-clothlets-to-be drying in so-called Vermont. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

Clothlets-to-be drying in a tree at Clayton Lake State Park in so-called New Mexico. Our sticky companion made the trip with us, and had an epic dry-time. We camped next to this tree. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

In the morning, I found this in a fold of the cloth. Ol’ buck-cloth was the perfect environment for cocoon-making, apparently. I cut this piece out and left it in the tree to incubate. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

The most complicated Ground Bright packet ever. Contains: two buckthorn clothlets (a technology I learned from medieval monks) to be rehydrated and used as a nice brown ink OR transformed into a lake pigment using the included alum, soda ash and mini ph paper. Alum and soda ash are mined, not wild or foraged. But widely used by pickle-makers and natural dyers. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

Clothlets soaking. Experimenting to make sure I got the ratios of dusts right. Photo: Tilke Elkins.

Laking in progress. Technically, this is called “flocculation.” Photo by Tilke Elkins.

Buckthorn lakes made with soda ash as alkali (top) and chalk (below). Photo: Tilke Elkins.

Yellow lakes are useful for making brilliant green when layered over indigo or green earth paints, as seen on these painted blocks. And since bright green is a tricky hue to conjure with wild pigments, it’s worth the effort, right? Photo: Tilke Elkins.

now back to sitka

I write to you from my studio at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. I’m here for my first-ever artist’s residency, a serious dream-come-true. I learned of this place years ago when I read Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which has hugely informed this project. The stunning chapter of the book called “Burning Cascade Head,” was inspired by Kimmerer’s time at a Sitka residency, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it — and the history of this place — since I arrived.

One of my fellow residents, Richard Williams, is co-writing a book about the state of crisis faced by pacific salmon. He reminded me of this powerful talk by Robin WK. I also highly recommend this recentish piece on OPB, called ‘Salmon People,’ or ‘Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum,’ about salmon as a way of life.

I’m listening to the waves and feeling for the place where, like the salt water mingling with the fresh water in the Salmon River estuary, the outer world and its living histories mingles with the inner world that is me.

Staying Open,

<3 Tilke

An ochre-blue heart-shaped teacher on the shore where the river meets the sea. Photo by Tilke Elkins.