pied midden : issue no. 42 : middens, pied : tilke elkins
Iris ink made from deadheaded bearded iris flowers. Photo by Tilke Elkins.
bright trash
It’s come to my attention in recent months that the name of this newsletter is obscure to most. When I chose ‘Pied Midden’ as its name, I had been reading about desert middens and amberrat and thinking too about layers of time and meaning found at the edges of human activity buried in secret piles under asphalt and turf. I liked the idea of this newsletter as a colorful heap of things that endure change, tossed off thoughts with lasting bones. Middens have a romance to them. They hold the idea that what’s thrown away may turn out to be even more valuable than what was kept — or at least, more telling.
‘Pied,’ meaning ‘having two or more different colors,’ which I selected as a tight substitute for candy-hued words like ‘multicolored’ or ‘rainbow,’ was probably a poor choice. While most people can in fact identify the Pied Piper as a dude from childhood (even now?!) the fact that his tights were red-and-yellow-checked doesn’t always carry over. It seems that the French word for ‘foot’ is a more common association with the word ‘pied,’ even for English speakers, which really sends this newsletter off in a different direction… one in which the word ‘midden’ tumbles out of context and into an even lower likelihood of being recognized as meaning a ‘refuse heap.’
Despite its failure to become a household name that trips easily off the tongues of pigment enthusiasts, ‘Pied Midden’ has in fact become an increasingly appropriate name for this newsletter. This winter, Ground Bright, the pigment subscription which funds this project and directs 22% of net proceeds to land and stewardship organizations made the switch from offering pigments foraged from wild places to a focus on pigments found in materials that have been discarded or removed from the landscape in acts of remediation.
Frozen iris petals defrosting. Photo by Tilke Elkins.
Tanoma Ochre was the first, a rich orange iron oxide ochre removed from waterways in Pennsylvania polluted with Acid Mine Drainage from abandoned mines. Buckthorn Pinke was a complex lake-making kit, yielding a brilliant yellow pigment made from berries picked from buckthorn bushes running rampant on Wabanaki Dawnlands back roads. Lu Kaliksh was the product of a three-way collaboration between an artist, a historian and a soil scientist that yielded a rich black pigment made from dozens of discarded scientific soil samples drawn from Louisiana’s rapidly vanishing coastline. Wildfire Redwood, In the Ruins and Bearded Iris were (respectively) the result of raging wildfires, the centuries-long mining for the stones used to build Buckingham Palace, and the dead-heading of neighborhood irises. To keep this paragraph concise, I’m directing you to this pigment-a-licious archive (put together by Noel!) that lists the names of all the delightful & generous people who gave the above pigments to this project.
Coming up in July and August we have a gallo-tannic ink kit made with dissolved firearms (from Thomas Little of A Rural Pen Inkworks) and a gorgeous blue copper-based gouache paint from a three-way collaboration between artist Catalina Christensen, Lucy Mayes of London Pigment, and Jason Logan of Toronto Ink Company, made with copper plumbing discards and other detritus.
The shift, for Ground Bright, towards so-called ‘trash’ pigments (what I think of as ‘orphaned materials’) and away from foraged plants and minerals has opened something new. The process of integrating orphaned materials back into relationships with people and places as pigments is a rich opportunity for artists to align their creative practices with their values.
Iris petal juice triple-saturating linen. Photo by Tilke Elkins.
Finally living up to its (okay, awkward) name, Pied Midden has in fact become exactly a newsletter about waste-heaps, trash piles, and refuse, i.e., middens. I’m pleased about this. As a paint maker, I think a lot about the ways in which people currently use (synthetic) paints, and how their practices would change if they moved to waste-stream-sourced paints instead. How much of what they do now would they be able to do using remediated paint materials? How much would they not be able to do, and how would that change the messages they communicate?
Painting is about expression, about sending a message. If the medium is the message, as the phrase would have it, then the message that synthetic paints send very often runs counter to what they intend to express. Pretty much every aspect of life as I know it is steeped in these sorts of contradictions, most of which are impossible to avoid in global systems culture. But when it comes to paint…perhaps there is some wiggle room there. Perhaps there is more room for choice than in other realms, room for radical change in what carries the message, and in that a greater chance that the message will be not just carried, but enacted.
green magic
Bearded Iris was the June pigment. I’ve been saving deadheaded bearded iris blossoms in the freezer for the past couple of summers so I’d have enough for this contribution, and it was well worth it. Green iris ink was one of those mysteries that awed me when I started exploring wild pigments, and for good reason. Used by medieval monks, the recipe for green ink made from purple-blue irises (the ones that smell like root beer) is pure magic — and so is the traditional way of transporting iris ink: clothlets. Clothlets are small squares of linen that are saturated with pure flower petal juice and left to dry multiple times in a row, resulting in a dried ink that can be activated in water. The blue liquid turns a beguiling green when applied to parchment or paper.
Bearded Iris’s 22% goes to Cha Tumenma, the Komemma Kalapuya land rematriation project now underway on Komemma Kalapuya traditional homelands.
Bearded Iris Clothlets. Photo by Tilke Elkins.
things i said
I’m this month’s pigment contributor, and as luck would have it, I’ve already been interviewed — twice!
The first is a radio interview with Barbara Dellenback, whose excellent radio show/ podcast, ‘Oregon Grapevine,’ features, “fresh-pressed conversations on Oregon-based issues.’ It’s a fast-paced interview that highlights what’s on my mind, pigment-wise, these days. I highly recommend digging into Barbara’s archive, too — lots of excellent interviews in there.
The second, which I’ll republish here, came out this month in The Queue,American Craft Magazine’s blog. The interview resulted from a conversation I shared with Shannon Stratton, who wrote about my work with Wild Pigment Project in the latest issue of the magazine.
Some excerpts from Origin Stories by Shannon Stratton in American Craft Magazine, Summer 2023. Photos by Tilke Elkins.
the queue: tilke elkins
The following interview appeared in The Queue, American Craft Magazine’s online blog, on Thursday, June 8, 2023. Read the interview in its original format, here.
Tilke Elkins sees wild possibilities in wild pigments.
Tilke Elkins’s practice is grounded—literally—in place. The Oregon-based writer, artist, researcher, and educator has been making paint since childhood. “At the time, I thought I was just pretending to make paint,” she says. “If only someone could have told me I was doing the real thing.” Since 2008, she has worked with wild pigments, foraged colorants originating from mineral and botanical sources. With deep reverence for the land and its traditional stewards, she makes paint—and then paintings—with these pigments, using waste objects as her canvas. In 2019, Elkins founded Wild Pigment Project, which invites artists—including textile and ceramic artists—to share pigments and the stories and culture around them through programs such as the Ground Bright pigment subscription series and the monthly newsletter Pied Midden. Shannon Stratton wrote about her work with Wild Pigment Project in “Origin Stories” in the Summer 2023 issue of American Craft.
How would you describe your work or practice in 50 words or less?
My pigment practice is a conversation about revolution and healing through embodied relationship-building with all beings. I call wild pigments “homeopathic doses of revolution” for the paradigm-shifting behaviors these dusts can initiate: reciprocity, regenerative economics, anti-racism, equity between species, Land Back, collaboration over competition, and the legitimizing of intuition.
Tell us about your first encounter with pigment in the wild. How did you use it?
Right after college, I visited the Ochre Pits of the Western Arrernte people in Australia’s Northern Territory with my travel-writer parents. Back home, I scraped the fine silt off the tops of puddles on a red dirt road, mixed it with gum arabic, and made my first watercolor of place with place.
What are your favorite tools in your tool kit, and how do you use them?
Rocks. They’re an original human tool and they’re still useful now. I arrive at my painting sites with nothing more than a paintbrush. Soft rocks are my pigments. Flat and rounded rocks act as mortars and pestles. Really flat rocks work for mulling. Even rocks that don’t look much like tools can be useful if you find their one flat edge. My industrially produced paintbrush serves as a bridge between geological deep time and the hectic extractive human world, giving me the easy precision I need to render the sharp edges of my inherited visual language.
Can you highlight some of your favorite projects and artworks created with pigments from the Ground Bright pigment subscription program?
Elaine Su-Hui—founder of Inner Fields, a social practice project building a culture of generosity and ecological wisdom—has made exquisite, mandala-like paintings with the full set of Ground Bright pigments. Poet and painter Daniela Naomi Molnar’s New Earth series incorporates the Ground Bright pigments into renderings of exposed shapes left by receding glaciers. Ink alchemist Thomas Little uses his contributed pigments, made with firearms dissolved in sulfuric acid, to collaborate with slime mold, creating exquisite networks of iron-carrying mycelial matter.
You publish a monthly newsletter called Pied Midden, which features interviews with wild pigment artists and researchers. Tell us about your favorite conversations.
A set of two interviews with Ngāti Awa / Ngāi Tūhoe / Ngāti Pūkeko artist Sarah Hudson, co-founder of the pigment research collective Kauae Raro, about contemporary pigment practices in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and the concept of being a good guest as a forager has been formative for me. I’ve also learned a great deal from conversations with Awabakal / Wonnarua / Bundjalung artist Melissa Ladkin about ochre protocols and reciprocal relationships with land. Textile artist and researcher Lucille Junkere offers potent reflections on the legacy of colonialism in African Caribbean textile history, and I was recently moved by a group interview with artist Heather Bird Harris, Atakapa-Ishak historian Jeffery U. Darensbourg, and wetland ecologist Ashley Booth about the rapid disappearance of the Louisiana coast. My ongoing dialog with Northwest Coast pigment researcher Melonie Ancheta continually informs my thinking.
Which craft artists, exhibitions, or projects do you think the world should know about, and why?
For me, the presence of materiality and skill as a feature of emotive and conceptual work signals an irrelevance to distinctions between art and craft. There’s a lot of pigment stuff happening this summer: form & concept's Wild Pigment Project group exhibition goes to NMSU’s University Art Museum with pigment sets, all the Ground Bright pigments, and work by more than a dozen of us pigment artists (June 22–September 16). Another group pigment show, Feeding the Unseen: Remediations of Earth, curated by Heidi Gustafson and Devon Deimler, runs June 3–July 30 at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. On July 22, WPP will launch the Pigments As Catalysts online talk series. The online Pigments Revealed Symposium 2023 is June 21–24, with a focus on sustainable pigment practices. I’ve got my eyes on the Kauae Raro Research Collective’s ongoing pigment knowledge sharing, and the just-launched C.R.A.F.T. (Centre for Retrofitting and Failure Techniques), planning a net-negative energy, wild pigment-centric printmaking studio on Hupacasath lands. Plus three new pigment books are coming out this year: Book of Earth by Heidi Gustafson, Found and Ground by Caroline Ross, and Gathering Colour by Caitlin ffrench. Other artists working with wild pigments to follow: painters Athena LaTocha, Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, and interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker Lehuauakea.
don’t miss this
There are two great group pigment exhibitions up right now: Feeding the Unseen: Remediations of Earth, curated by Heidi Gustafson and Devon Deimler, which is at the gallery at the Philosophical Research Institute in L.A. until July 30th, and Wild Pigment Project, curated by me, up at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in Las Cruces, until September 16th. Many and much thanks to Jordan Eddy of form & concept, Marisa Sage and the whole install crew at NMSU for the hypersmooth install and gorgeous opening night. If you get down there, you can also check out a sweet exhibit of sculptures by Karen Yank alongside her mentor Agnes Martin’s delicate prints, plus Cara DeSpain’s terrifying immersive multimedia solo exhibition exploring nuclear weapons development.
On July 11th, I’ll be joining artist and lake-making expert Natalie Stopka for a shared conversation about waste stream materials on FEEDBACK FRIDAY, Botanical Colors epic weekly video blog.
On July 22nd, textile artist Lucille Junkere will be the first speaker for an exciting new bi-monthly (once every two months) Wild Pigment Project series, called Pigments As Catalysts. The series will be offered by donation, with 100% of proceeds going to the speaker. Lucille will open a conversation about indigo’s place in the legacy of colonialism in African Caribbean textile history, and the subject of scientific racism.
In September, our second speaker, artist Hannah Chalew will address the subject of ‘Insurgent Pigments: Engaging with Animate Materiality for a Livable Future.’ So excited about this series!
That’s all for now. May you sink into summer and have lots of non-verbal talking time with beloved beings.
Write to me if you have thoughts on any of this — your whispers make my day. Just hit reply / info@wildpigmentproject.org.
Stay In Awe,
<3 Tilke
Ceremonies for Being With Nechesni by Tilke Elkins; stone pigments on found driftwood. All Photos featured in The Queue interview by Tilke Elkins.