pied midden : issue no.41 : in the ruins : shinehah bigham & caroline ross
****Listen to May Ground Bright contributor Caroline Ross read her essay, ‘In the Ruins’ below.****
‘In the Ruins’ ruins. Image courtesy of Caroline ross.
falling fruit, rock, empires
After four years of regular monthly outpourings in this newsletter, I’ve just let a couple months slide. So much happening in both the inward and outward — as you’ll see in the “news” section at the end, here. This past month, Noelle and I traveled north to Hupačasath lands, colonially known as Port Alberni, Vancouver Island, BC, to visit the exciting project that is C.R.A.F.T. (the Center for Retrofitting and Failure Techniques, or ‘qʷicčiƛma,’ translated from nuučaańuł as ‘the sky opened up’). Artists Rodney Sayer and Emily Luce are exploring what it means to be a net-negative energy printmaking studio, and I was there to join the brainstorm about wild pigments as printing inks. We also had the great pleasure of connecting with Juliana Bedoya of Plants Are Teachers. I could happily devote an entire newsletter to this phenomenal trip! Certainly more to come about that northern scene in future.
This issue is going to feature the words (and images!) of others. First, as catch-up from last month, a sweet piece of writing about disaster and the exhilaration of windfall fruits from Shinehah Bigham, whose silky black ‘Wildfire Redwood’ was the April Ground Bright pigment. Shinehah is a pigment artist with a dedicated foraging practice whose delicate, layered paintings have long delighted me, especially the ones of crows and oak trees. She dedicated the monthly donation to the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, which ‘restores indigenous knowledge and practices to Popeloutchom.’.
Shinehah relishes the time she spends foraging and painting. She works full time as a water system operator for Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, supplying recycled water to farmers along the coast.
Shinehah Bigham,’Inside you there is also now an oak forest.’ Locally foraged earth pigments and black walnut & oak gall inks on wood panel. 16" x 20". Photo courtesy of Shinehah Bigham.
Fallen Fruit by Shinehah Bigham
In a meeting at work last week, we were discussing methods of coping with “disasters” that affect our work, like covid, CZU wildfires, California wildfire smoke, flooding caused by the atmospheric river, ocean storm surges, increasingly higher King Tides, power outages (there was a recent battery fire at the nearest substation), and someone said “what’s next?” I said, “earthquake” and several people looked at me with wide eyes and knocked on the wooden table with their knuckles. (The Loma Prieta earthquake hit this area very hard and many of them were here during that disaster.)
Since our infrastructure in this area, both human-made and the structure of the natural environment, isn’t developed to handle the amount and intensity of extreme climate events that we have been receiving, it feels like it is re-forming us and opening us up to what is underneath. Rain, floods, extreme tides, fire all change the landscape with burned forests, mudslides, roads washing out, trees falling, cliffs falling into the ocean. Ash falls and mixes with mud. Places in the earth are opened up and exposed like wounds.
Some folks have asked or assumed that I mine my pigments, but the answer is no. I only pluck what has fallen, like windfall fruit, before it gets disintegrated under people’s feet or washed away into the sea. Windfallen fruit is ready to be harvested, like the time in my childhood when there was a hail storm, and big balls of hail the size of golf balls felled the ripe peaches in my grandma’s neighbor’s strip of land between their driveways. My sister and I only took a few, knowing that she had been saving them for her grandchildren, and might come to pick them up herself. Sure enough, even though they had fallen and were cratered with holes, the neighbor lady knew that we had taken them. She must have had every piece of fruit on those little trees counted. Or maybe she was peeking out between her blinds when we picked them up. The trouble we got in was worth it, every bite sweet and juicy! The gravity of the damage of that storm we could see all around us, the shattered cat’s dish, dented cars, holes in the carport roof, cracked windshields, and traumatized pet cat who didn’t return for a week. Eating those lovely dripping peaches wasn’t disrespecting these facts, but rather taking them up to enjoy because they were there for the taking.
Yerba Santa Flanked by California Thrasher & Jack Rabbit, A Triptych from the Inherently Sacred Series. Locally foraged earth. Image courtesy of Shinehah Bigham.
Peaches, climate disasters, erosion. My current fallen fruit: locally foraged pigment for artmaking. As I was when we took those peaches I am just as guilty when collecting the stones, ochres, charcoal, clay. Not delighted by the disasters… I am concerned for our neighbors, the humans, forests, animals and watersheds, but still, delighting in the windfall. Making art out of what is here at my feet. The paintings I paint often represent trees, birds, plants and landscapes of this place, art made of where it is from, and usually behind, or woven in, are abstract shapes and patterns that show a layer of what is beyond our immediate view of these entities--- especially the uncertainty of climate change. We the inhabitants of our place (insects, animals, trees, mountains, beaches, stones, houses, cars, communities of lichen, communities of people, fish…) are living in this environment of change. The nature of life is to live and so we do, and we will inevitably die along the way (one way or another and sooner or later), hopefully reseeding and growing in ways that are more sustainable, adapting and living through upheaval, we may allow ourselves to grieve the losses and upheavals, but also be fed and exhilarated by windfalls while we continue to live.
~ Shinehah Bigham, April 2023
‘…the edge of a spoil heap of sea-smoothed quarry waste and unwanted rocks from the island where the stone was sourced for Buckingham Palace, Whitehall.’ Photo by Caroline Ross.
now, caro
Next, a missive from four-time Ground Bright contributor Caroline Ross, whose ‘In the Ruins’ is the featured pigment this month, the month of the coronation of England’s new king. The pigment is a soft green Caro foraged from the very same island where the stone used to build Buckingham Palace was cut, though this is a green mudstone and the palace rock is a white limestone. This synchronicity is a reflection of Caro’s genius sense of timing. As the world watches an old ceremony of spectacular irony unfurl , Ground Bright ships out its tiny packets of dust found dumped in a heap to make way for the removal of the alabaster building blocks of the Empire : humble dust with the capacity, perhaps, to whisper to us through the clamor of colonial psychosis. I’ll let Caro tell the rest of the story, below.
But before I do, another synchronicity: in the coming month, Caro’s new book about paint-making will also be ready to fall into your hands. I haven’t seen a copy yet, but I suspect that Found and Ground: a practical guide to making your own foraged paints is a straightforward, generous book that sparkles with Caro’s warm revolutionary cheer. It’s certain to fling the doors open to magic for many a soul.
If you want to drink a deep draught of that same kind of puckish, monk-like, reverent, irreverent and, well, profoundly illuminating and useful proclamation, I suggest you subscribe to Caro’s Substack, Uncivil Savant (the name truly does describe it & Caro so well), which appears in both typed and read-aloud versions. Chi Kung, T’ai Chi, Making All Sorts of Stuff With Your Hands, raging against the machine, the importance of talking about the weather, rock n’ roll and “land joy” are regular subjects.
Caro’s copy of her book, hot off the press! Photo by Caroline Ross.
In the Ruins by Caroline Ross
I'm sitting on a bed in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania after three hours fleshing deer hides on the beam, getting ready to make parchment with my friend Dr Theresa Emmerich Kamper next week, when we head to Vermont to teach pigments, parchment, quill pens, inks and paints at In Situ Polyculture. The physical work today was a wonderful antidote to the time I must spend on screen, making things come together for the launch of my foraged paints book Found and Ground in a couple of months. I ache all over right now, but I have no complaints!
Pigment friends, dirt nerds and all you people who love Earth and its colours know that sometimes you’ll find an ochre that is so dramatic and so wonderful it jumps out at you. Last year with ‘Spoils’ haematite red ochre from Bath, that was certainly the case. My offering for you this year is somewhat different and has a story to tell. This pale green is an unassumingly beautiful colour, but it doesn't leap into your eyes. It gently invites the gaze. It looks best against oranges, pinks and reds, and really sings mixed with a little white. I find it adds a beautiful tone as a background to ink drawings. But it's not the colour I wanted to give you; it's the colour I was given.
Photo by Caroline Ross.
Two years ago I collected a deep green clay pigment from some cliffs that had crumbled on the Jurassic Coast, near where I live. Where I go fishing there was a new landslide, uncovering a similar toned deep green to the Oregon Kalapuya County also from Ground Bright. I put a large bag of this aside and knew that I'd be sending it to Tilke for all of you to enjoy, but unfortunately it was lost when my studio was destroyed, (two years ago tomorrow). I had made one swatch of that dark green, which is in my sketchbook, the new green here was unearthed when a new landslide from the same cliff covered all of the remaining dark green I had gone to collect. This pale green is from some rocks maybe 4 feet deeper into the cliff. So here it is: not the green that I had chosen for you, but the green that the land allowed me to gather. Though small, regular, landslides are ongoing, prompted by ‘natural causes’, we cannot say to what degree the rain and wind that batters the south west coast of England is as it should be, because Anthropogenic change is a factor in the weather, especially in coastal Britain.
The lost green. Photo by Caroline Ross.
The found green (it looks much greener than this IRL!). Photo by Caroline Ross.
So why ‘In the ruins’? My dear friend Dougald Hine has written a book called ‘At Work in the Ruins’ where he talks about the ongoing catastrophe of modernity, climate change and the predicament that we are in. The book is moving, thoughtful, and I really recommend it to you. Particularly, I'd love to draw your attention to 4 points at the end of the book, which really made an impression on my heart. Dougald was talking about what we can take from modernity and this strange collapsing mess we find ourselves in. There are many pieces of great advice in the book, but these four will really make a difference as we move through unsettling times into an unknown future. To paraphrase -
1: We can salvage the good that there is in modernity, the things that are worth saving, which don't crush us and don't destroy the planet.
2: We can mourn the good that can't be taken with us, such as some of the things that fossil fuels have given us that we're going to miss, for instance. Some things we do now with ease, which we won't be able to do in the future.
3: We can practice discernment. Maybe some of the things that we've told ourselves were good about modernity, progress and the so-called advanced ‘western’ way of doing things weren't as great as we said they were.
4: We can look for the dropped threads, the things that have been marked as extinct or obsolete which are actually still necessary and useful. We can look to the best things of the past that have been relegated to history books or described as quaint habits of our ancestors. Here is where I habitually hang out, in practising my strange amalgam arts, part making, part recovering old ways, part experimentation, part reverence.
Those of you who know my work will spot how much Dougald's ideas above resonate in it. My practice is about finding what's not perfect or pure, and working with that. Of course it's wonderful to have the perfect colour! I love that. But this time I've got a very pale, sweet, southern green for you and for me. It'll be beautiful in the background of a landscape painting as a classic terre verte. It will help your warm colours zing, but it won't take centre stage. I gathered it in my home county of Dorset, England, dried and pounded it by hand in a stone pestle and mortar for about four hours over all, mainly sitting on the wall outside my flat while listening to podcasts in the warm sunshine. It was fun explaining what I was doing when passing neighbours asked what I was up to. A few people asked me how to make paint, others asked if I minded the hard work. All of the conversations were good ones, the kind we need to have more of. I sieved the pounded rock through a geologist’s screen at 150 µm until it was a fine enough pigment size for paint, but so that when I mixed it with watercolour medium it had a lovely gentle granulation. It gives a kind of ferny effect, but can still mix with bought watercolours. The residue grit from the refining process will go back to the cliff base next month, completing the cycle.
Photo by Caroline Ross.
I hope you like In The Ruins in all its imperfection. When I was gathering it, I knew it was for my fourth pigment with Ground Bright. I am really happy for once it isn't something dramatic or super colourful, just a real expression of a place that I love by the sea.
Footnote: The place I gathered the pigment from is the edge of a spoil heap of sea-smoothed quarry waste and unwanted rocks from the island where the stone was sourced for Buckingham Palace, Whitehall (the UK Government offices) and St Paul’s Cathedral in London, rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire in 1666. Due to this extraction, the island was denuded of trees, stripped of its soil, and all the men were made to work the quarries, and were not free to do other work, even to join the army during wars, for hundreds of years. As the next Coronation approaches, and I am happily 5000 miles away, I like to think of these little packets of green dust, foraged from The Crown Estate by this commoner, winging their way into your hands. I hope they help you make great art for land and freedom for all.
A portion of the proceeds will go towards Right To Roam, a grass roots land access charity for everyone in England. In my country, over 92% of the land and rivers are not open to the people, whereas in Scotland or Sweden, for instance, everyone has the right to roam, if causing no damage. For 1000 years my fellow English folk have been displaced from the land, and this charity are using art, peaceful trespass, creativity, song, history, solidarity and education to force changes to the archaic, Norman Conquest era injustices that still persist (and have even been getting worse), to this day. They are already making a difference.
Photo by Caroline Ross.
news, so much news
Caro’s book! Heidi’s book! The Pigments Revealed Symposium! And Exhibits galore!!
First off, a thing very exciting for WPP: a condensed version of the form & concept Wild Pigment Project Group Exhibition has been invited to exhibit at the New Mexico State University Museum. After the massive amount of detailed work that all of us (and especially f & c director/art writer Jordan Eddy) put into the show, it’s wonderful to be able to keep its fire aglow for longer.
Also, another group pigment show is opening this June: curators Heidi Gustafson and Devon Deimler bring us Feeding The Unseen, which will feature work by Sarah Hudson, Thomas Little, Camas Logue, Jason Logan, Marílu Ríos Guerrero, me and Heidi, and a slew of others! All deets below.
Also…Noelle and I are going to be in the bay area for Heidi’s gig, and because we’re both giving workshops at the legendary Fibershed ranch in Point Reyes, May 27th & 28th. Noelle’s is called A Needle & Some Thread, which is all you need to learn why sewing garments by hand from start to finish is the bomb and will change your life forever. Noelle is masterful at this and brimming with secrets to share. Also, there’s one more full scholarship open for my course, called ‘Pigmentshed: Hyperlocal Palettes.’
BOOK-RELATED
Found and Ground: a practical guide to making your own foraged paints by Caroline Ross. Available June 30th at your favorite bookstore.
The Book of Earth by Heidi Gustafson. Available May 16th. Widely available too.
Heidi’s Book Release events:
May 18th 7pm at Third Place Books in Seattle, WA: a reading and conversation with Melonie Ancheta, founding director of Pigments Revealed International.
May 26th, 3:30, Oakland, CA: a reading and performance at the Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium (virtual & in-person). RSVP here. See you there!!
EXHIBITS
Form & Concept’s Wild Pigment Project Group Exhibition, curated by Tilke Elkins at NMSU University Museum in Las Cruses, NM. June 10 through September 9th.
Related Events:
Opening and Walkthrough with Tilke: June 22nd
Hyperlocal Palettes in-person workshop with Tilke: June 10th
Feeding the Unseen: Remediations of Earth exhibit, curated by Heidi Gustafson and Devon Deimler. On View: June 3-July 30.
Related Events:
Opening Reception and Book Release: June 3, RSVP
Virtual Artists Panel: July 15, 12:00-2:00pm | RSVP
GATHERINGS
Pigments Revealed Symposium June 21 through 24, online, with a focus on sustainable (mostly Eurocentric, at this time, as I see it) pigment practices. Keynote Speaker, Narayan Khandekar. Also speaking: John Sabraw, Onya McCausland, Caroline Ross, Jeremy Fowler, Jane Marshing. Panels, demos, games & much more. 15% of proceeds go to Milkist and Camp Tabonuco. Register here.
Feedback Friday, July 14th: Natalie Stopka & Tilke Elkins discuss human relationships with abundant and over-abundant pigment plants. July 14, 9 am Pacific Time (online, free). RSVP
Finally, registration is now open for a new six-month long session of my Being with Pigments course, beginning this December.
There’s of course much much more pigment power happening on this big beautiful ball…let me know what I’ve missed and I’ll put it in the next newsletter. Write to me any time at info@wildpigmentproject.org. I love to hear from you!
Stay With Us,
<3
Tilke
Plus this is happening this coming winter... Early registration now open through this link.