pied midden : issue no.40 : radical noticing : heather bird harris

***Listen to this month’s interview with Heather Bird Harris, Jeffrey U. Darensbourg and Ashley Booth below***

Pigments offered back to the land during my Sitka residency. Photo by Tilke Elkins.

ceremonies for being with

It's been a week since I got home from my five weeks as a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology and I'm finally starting to land. It was a tremendous time. Big energy. The place is large and large-spirited in a way that brought me a constant racing joy in response to the invitation of challenge, and a feeling of being met -- by the other beings, by the land, by the spirits, by the other residents, locals, and the staff there (especially Nicola and Nancy! <3!).

I arrived at Sitka knowing nothing about the pigments I might encounter there, fully aware that many stretches of the Oregon coastline are mostly sandy with a little bit of yellow ochre and some magnetite. What I found, on the beach where the Salmon River meets the ocean, was an astounding community of minerals that slowly revealed themselves to me as I crouched in their midst every day. 

Time is the only truly essential ingredient to art, and thus the most valuable gift an artist can receive. I noticed, on the faces of all seven of the other residents there with me at Sitka, a kind of grateful shock, an incredulity at the miracle of the gift, its generosity.

While at Sitka, I had the great pleasure and honor to spend time making paint there on the banks of the Salmon River with Tribal Elder and artist Ann Lewis, and three of her friends. Lewis paints under her Native name, "Nestucca," a name given to her in a ceremony which belongs to her great-great-grandfather, Nestucca Bobb, Tillamook Tribal chief, whose land was not far from the site where we gathered to forage and make paint together. Here we all are, pictured below.

Pictured here, from left to right: Orquidia Violetta, Ann Lewis, friends Mary and Jean, Danielle Vogel, Susie. Photo by Tilke Elkins.

As a window in to my time on the beach, I thought I’d share with you a little of the text I prepared for a short talk I (somewhat nervously) gave, along with the rest of my cohort, in the middle of my residency. That presentation should be available soon through the Sitka YouTube channel. Also, I highly recommend that you tune in today at 4pm PST for a presentation by Orquidia Violetta, another from my cohort, a visionary textile artist.

Here are some excerpts from my talk…

ceremonies for being with — text excerpts from 02.07.23 online presentation through sitka center

I’m here at the Sitka Center on the homelands of the Salmon River Band of the Tillamook people, a place also known as Nechesni, which people from both the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz are deeply connected to. I give my thanks to all people, beings and elementals connected to this place. I’m immensely grateful to the Sitka Center and all its supporters for making my time here possible.

In coming here, I had a clear desire, which was to engage in a reciprocal relationship with a place through my art practice with pigments. I wanted to spend time being with an interspecies community in an unbroken, day-to-day way,  to wake up and be here without needing to get in a car, to walk out the door and be in the midst of many other-than-human lives.

The past four years, I’ve been deeply engaged in introducing wild pigment studio practice to artists all over the world through Wild Pigment Project, an adventure that’s been exhilarating and all-consuming. So my time here at Sitka has been a moment away from that intense work.

Being with coastal pigments during my residency. Photo by Tilke Elkins.

For many years, I’ve wanted to be able to walk into a place with nothing but a paintbrush and make a painting, and that’s what I’ve been able to do since arriving here. It took me time to drop in and get to know the minerals, which are a mixture of volcanic and sedimentary rocks — mudstones in the Nestucca formation in various stages of decay. As I understand it, 86 million years ago the highland meadow here that towers over the ocean was an underwater volcano, which has since been layered over with many different kinds of iron-rich sediments. At first, the stone beaches here appear very subtle, just browns and grays, but iron is deep at work in these minerals and now that I’ve walked the long stretch of beach along the mouth of the estuary every day, my eyes have learned to see the incredible palette that lives in these rocks.

The subtle tuning in, relaxing and spending time moving, doing, and receiving but actually not thinking that foraging requires is, for me, what’s needed to “Be With” — to be in relationship with. Painting is the excuse, really. It’s the gift I get for being present, it’s permission for me to try to touch the inner aching I feel towards beauty. 

Salmon River estuary clay pigments gathered by me, Tilke Elkins, during my residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology last month. Photo by Tilke Elkins.

I’m framing this work as Ceremonies for Being With. I’ve spent most of nearly every day on a somewhat remote stretch of beach that takes me about an hour to walk to from the Sitka campus. Because of its remoteness and lack of human activity, I’m able to really connect with the other beings there — to get to know the specific ducks I see every day, and the heron, and the otter who’s always eating, and the seals who watch me and slap their flippers on the water’s surface at slack tide and who I watch. Showing up with just a paintbrush in a place and slowly discovering a broad mineral palette, rocks to use as a mortar and pestle, and muller, discarded boards worn smooth by wave action to paint on, and the right size shells to carry water and hold paint — all these things have felt like ceremonies of being-with for me and everyone I come close to while I’m there. 

Author Robin Wall Kimmerer is a former Sitka resident, who famously wrote some key chapters of her paradigm-shifting volume, Braiding Sweetgrass, while a Sitka resident, including the chapter called “Burning Cascade Head.” In this chapter, she writes,

“Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. […] Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life.

Writing of the lack of ceremonies connected to land in colonist society, she says, “Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed [in the old country] but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with the land.”

(end)

Heather Bird Harris in studio with soil pigments. Photo courtesy of Heather Bird Harris.

radical noticing

This month’s Ground Bright pigment was contributed by artist Heather Bird Harris (aka Bird). Bird is an artist, educator, and activist working in Atlanta and New Orleans. Her work explores land history, environmental crises, and mothering in the face of climate change. Bird's practice includes painting and social practice, which engage site-specific earth pigments as catalysts for connection to historical narratives, environmental risks, and collective action. Her work was recently featured nationally on NPR and locally in New Orleans and Baton Rouge in a great piece by Halle Parker, who also interviewed me and artist Hannah Chalew (read and listen here).

Heather Bird Harris in-studio. Photo courtesy of Heather Bird Harris.

Bird teamed up with two people for her Ground Bright contribution: Indigenous historian Jeffery U. Darensbourg and soil scientist Ashley Booth. 

Ashley Booth is a wetland ecologist and writer interested in how humans, flora, fauna, and the earth interact. Her interest in the connection between community and place is an outgrowth of her graduate research on wetland resilience and sustainability in Gulf Coast (USA) marshes. She currently works as a legislative fellow for the US Congress helping translate science into policy. 

Jeffery U. Darensbourg is a writer, researcher, and artist of many genres who lives in Bulbancha, the places colonists attempted to rename as "New Orleans." He is a Louisiana Creole and an enrolled member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Indians. His work focuses on Indigenous contributions to Louisiana culture and the experiences of mixed-ethnicity people. One of Jeffery’s areas of focus is language renewal, and as part of a collaboration with Bird, he gave this pigment its name: ‘Lu Kaliksh.’ Lu Kaliksh means both “dirt crushed by hand” and “dirt was worn out” — a fitting name for this pigment, I think, on many levels.

Bird, Ashley and Jeffery chatting in Hannah Chalew’s studio. Photo courtesy of Heather Bird Harris.

'Lu Kaliksh' is wetland soil from Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Grand Chenier, which is in southwest Louisiana on Atakapa-Ishak land. The soil was collected by Ashely, a Louisiana-based soil scientist, and then donated to Bird for her studio practice. Ashley sampled the soil from various depths to research the effectiveness of wetland conservation strategies. Due to a variety of factors stemming from colonization, the coast of Louisiana has lost over 1,900 square miles of land (the size of Delaware) in the last 100 years and is still losing a football field of land every hour. 

We wanted to do a four-way interview for the newsletter, between me, Bird, Jeffery and Ashley, so instead of attempting that through email, we Zoomed last week and turned the interview into an audio file for you. It is, let me tell you, packed with insights, wisdom and sound advise for how to move forward as a human, regardless of what you do, in this time of reckoning with the great disasters of the global colonial project. Bird describes the information she records with her body through pigment practice, Ashley describes the way science connects her to beauty (in the form of a pink spider!) and Jeffery shares two unforgettable stories of how Indigenous scientific knowledge preserved in oral history and song saved the lives of thousands of people.

To listen, you’ll click the button, which will take you to the archived newsletter where the recording is stored. 

Huge thanks to Bird, Jeffery and Ashley for your contribution to Lu Kaliksh and this interview!

Soil sample becoming paint in heather Bird Harris’s studio. Photo courtesy of Heather Bird Harris.

now we are four

This month marks the fourth anniversary of Wild Pigment Project. That’s more than 40 pigments and newsletters! And more than 28K raised for land/cultural stewards. THANKKKKK YOUUUUUU readers, subscribers, contributors, land stewards and land beings, fans, students, friends!! Thank you thank you to my partner Noelle Guetti for all the ways you carry and support this project, including filling all those tiny envelopes with pigment and writing each one’s name on by hand! And infinite love and thanks to this ball of iron who’s carrying us through space. <3<3<3

As Wild Pigment Project continues to evolve, I have some juicy new stuff to share with you.

In April, I’ll be launching a bi-monthly (that’s every two months) “talk and conversation” series called PIGMENTS AS CATALYSTS. Brilliant textile & pigment artist Lucille Junkere will open the series, sharing about her research with feral indigo in Jamaica and its history of commodification and production through the enslavement of kidnapped Africans in the 1500s.

Beginning this month, Wild Pigment Project will feature an ARTIST SPOTLIGHT, focused on pigment artists changing culture with their work. An artist I’ve long admired, Athena LaTocha, will be the first feature. Please stay tuned! Coming very soon.

AND: I’m visioning a way to share art made by YOU — Ground Bright subscribers! —  using Ground Bright pigments. If YOU have any work you’d like to share, please email it to me at info@wildpigmentproject.org. Be sure to clearly state your name, where you are, and exactly which Ground Bright pigments are present in your work (images must be at least 200dpi/15 inches wide, and included in your email).

Thoughts about the content of this newsletter? Your emails quicken my heart — feel free to hit “reply” or write to me at the above email address.

Stay Radical,

<3 Tilke

Minerals I gathered at the mouth of the Salmon River. Photo by Tilke Elkins