pied midden : issue no. 44 : ochre voices : noel guetti

ochres everywhere

Bricks are ochre, of course. Red bricks were once yellow or dun-colored ochre clays that turned red when heated, ‘calcining’ from a hydrous yellow iron oxide to an anhydrous red iron oxide, ie, brittle red ochre. And for a while, red bricks were the bones that industry rested upon. This means that flat, dun-colored landscapes, if they’re urban, are likely to have vacant lots, alleyways, or riverbanks scattered with red brick shards. Terra cotta tiles or broken flower pots are the same stuff, and these are ubiquitous in many cities.

Why does this matter? Smash up red bricks and you have ochre dust: red pigment. And why is this important? Well, because ochre is special. Iron is special. Iron forms the heart of the planet, it runs through our veins, and it holds us together. Like bricks, it houses our spirits, you could say. I sensed this the first time ochre entered into my perception in a significant way. I walked into an ancient ochre quarry in Roussillon, France, on my 16th trip around the sun, and everything stopped. I felt meaning pour itself into my life like milk into a jug. I hummed with its significance, though I had no way to understand it, then. I came to know ochre, and ochre landscapes, as an insistent rhythm in my life, whose presence signified potency and transformation.

Heidi Gustafson, recent author of the phenomenal Book of Earth (reviewed below) was pulled into relationship with ochre through a dream, as an adult. Ochre spoke to her directly and with insistence. They spoke to her, and through her. A philosopher, an artist, a diviner, and an incredible (funny, direct, sly, poetic, incisive) writer, Heidi listened and spoke back. Book of Earth holds their conversations.

the old brickworks

Above is a photo of textile wizard Noel Guetti, wrapped in a cloth he designed and wove out of repurposed cotton and linen yarns he dyed with nettles, onion skins, iron, and ochre earths. He made this cloth into a pair of ceremonial pants for none other than Heidi Gustafson, who wore the pants during her recent book tour and says they’ll be part of her burial garb. The ochres in this cloth come from beaches and cliffs in the Pacific North West, Heidi’s home.

In New England, where Noel came into being, deep layers of rich black soils and tree roots hide the seams of red ochre that may or may not run under the farm fields and forests. But brick shards — often, the remains of the textile mills that were, for a time, the center of many a tiny Vermont or New Hampshire town — are everywhere. Having left the West for a spell, Noel finds himself magnetized to these broken ochres, which hold vibrations of textile history, as the remains of buildings that may have once housed the massive looms that Noel has come to adore and weave on, at the Marshfield School of Weaving, in Marshfield, Vermont.

The Marshfield School houses the largest collection of working 18th and 19th century looms in the country. The aim of the school is to teach people how to weave on these old creatures, and care for them. It’s a loom temple, on a high grassy hill pressed up against clouds, surrounded by woods, sung to by crickets and cows. Noel will be teaching his methods for weaving, designing and tailoring an elegant wool jacket there this fall.

*Hemp jacket woven, designed and sewn last fall at the Marshfield School of Weaving by Noel Guetti. Photo Courtesy of Noel Guetti.*

Field Clothes: After Shadows: 60” x 25”. Handwoven hemp, organic cotton, dyed with nettles, onion skins, and iron, by Noel Guetti, custom made for Tilke Elkins, 2022. Photo courtesy of Noel Guetti.

sneaking up on time

Noel contributed this deep red iron oxide pigment, made with the crushed red bricks of old New England textile mills, as MILL TOWN, Ground Bright’s August pigment. In addition to weaving mile upon mile of cloth and making exquisite custom garments for artists, Noel has been the head cook at Not Back To School Camp, a camp for unschooled teens, for many years, and this year is the first post-pando camp session. Needless to say, he declined to be interview for Pied Midden for now. In lieu of an interview, I’d like to share the description Noel wrote to accompany MILL TOWN. It’s a beautiful little story-poem.

Noel writes:

'“bricks are an easily overlooked visual trace of the textile mill history of Lebanon, NH, where I spent the bulk of my childhood. they’re all around here - the solid walls of the old mill-building-turned-business-park, the municipal buildings around the town green, crumbling out of the embankment above a railroad bed i walked with my dad as a kid, now transformed into a paved bikeway.

in the overgrown lot beside the high school is an old brickworks - the site of the densmore brick co., which opened in 1800 and turned out up to 95,000 bricks a week until 1974, all from the clay-rich pond bed beside the kilns. these bricks housed the grist and fulling mills, the dye works, the spinnery, the tannery, and were what remained through several major fires.

after several decades’ tumble-down forgetting, this town is undergoing new burst of development and economic growth, and most of the ragged places that held open a door for my imagination during my adolescent journeying into the underworld have been cleaned up. loose bricks are harder to come by. these particular bricks came from a site near the old Mascoma Flannel Mill, one of the largest remaining buildings from Lebanon’s industrial boom times.

being back here working as a weaver and clothing maker in a town built around textile mills, making my cloth on historic looms that predate the bricks of industrialization, i feel like i’m sneaking up alongside time, jumping back and forth in it, crumbling the story of its linearity between my fingers. maybe we’re doing the same with these bricks.”

~ august, 2023, lebanon, new hampshire

book of earth by heidi gustafson, reviewed by tilke elkins

“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it…and no one can fight it but you and no one can fight it for you.”
~ Diane di Prima, as quoted on p.17 of Book of Earth, from the ‘On Ochre’ section.

Book of Earth is an initiation: there’s no other way I can say it. To read and take in each word while held in the visually numinous atmosphere of Ochre is to be rearranged — certainly spiritually and ethically, and perhaps molecularly too.

The book is, as Heidi says in the introduction, an effort to “…explore the revolutionary [emphasis mine] and deep ecological approach to earth pigments, as part of my own fight to nourish exhausted imaginations.” Imaginations assaulted by screens, bled out by Netflix, starved by the assertions of science and obliterated by the endless grind of unchecked extractive commerce and unlimited financial aspiration. Imagination — ‘the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses’ — is, in my mind, a word which also refers to our capacity to to connect with other beings. The act of forming mental images — or we could say, ‘receiving’ mental images — of things not present is very much, in my experience, how intuited communication works. When I want to communicate with a bee or a flower or a rock or a pot-bellied pig, I do so by opening my mind to imagery, and then offering images back. I see this intuited language as the common voice between beings — without it, connection has limits.

Let’s go back to science. Lots of people out there who have fallen in love with earth pigments want to find their way deeper in by delving into the ‘science’ of rocks and color and stuff. Science is perceived as a way to get closer to the visual magic that entrances. Knowledge = intimacy. And I agree. Knowledge which inspires wonder and awe is clearly a pathway to increased passion. For example, this detail from Book of Earth, part of a description of iron’s cosmic birth, which occurs at the precise moment a star begins to die:

“…[A]ll complex forms of matter, every weird element in the universe that comes after iron (up to element 118 on the periodic chart thus far) would not exist without the clear breakdown made by iron’s self-destructing power.” (Book of Earth, p.23).

Iron = earth = ochre. To understand that the iron present in all ochre came from the death of stars and is the veritable mother of all subsequent elements DEFINITELY makes me feel closer to iron and ochre. So, science rules, right? Like, literally? A book about earth pigments should be a book of facts that pull us close to this marvelous multicolored stuff we adore. But — and here’s the crucial, revolutionary, crap-shattering thing about Book of Earth — science is welcome, but is far from the only player. As they should be, science and imagination are lovers, intermingling and charging each other up, gracefully taking turns stepping in and out of the lime light both alone and together.

With this in mind, curious about what non-pigment-people out there might be thinking about Heidi’s book, I turned to the Bezos Empire to peek at the (scant) low-star reviews amidst the raves. This is my favorite rotten fruit, by “fleegle”:

“I bought this book because I love color, and all the elements that make up color. I was hoping for forthright descriptions of earth pigments, but most of the book is couched in third-world blather… “mythic paradigm” being only one of the many bloviations that substitute for real facts. The photographs are gorgeous and if you dig around long enough there are some interesting factoids to be found. If you adore metaphysical muttering and don’t care much about actually learning about the subject, this book will do the job. If you actually want to learn about ochres, best to find a different source.” (third-world blather?!? um, excuse me??)

Of course, I would gladly go hoarse arguing for the opposite — that this is the best, and possibly the only book that will actually teach you, in a multivalent way, about ochres. This equity between science and imagination is precisely why. Heidi doesn’t just awe you with facts. She breaks you open by offering herself as a window in (an Ochre Window…) to her own intimate, body-centric, intuited, and living relationship with ochres, one that spans the globe and connects through the 600+ ochres from diverse cultures (many Indigenous), housed in her sanctuary/columbarium. She calls on the reader to picture themself immersed in the full-sensory, imaginatively-open relationship with ochre that she models through poetry, image and assertion. She offers layers and layers of practices, inner and outer, through which one might find ways into actual lived relationship with ochre. The science of iron-eating organisms, stars, nuclear waste, blood, bones, magnets, and vultures is layered with foraging practice jewels — the many many ways to open your eyes and slowly bring ochre in the land into focus — plus meditations on rock crushing techniques, epiphanic lists of possible paint binders (55 categories of plant essences, 46 types of animal goo, and 19 specifically human exudations — not to mention 33 different kinds of water!) and detailed recipes for working with ochres as watercolors, cheek balm, drawing sticks, house paint, edible ferments, and much more.

Like a true trickster trumpet, Book of Earth both revels in science and mocks science. The book is a manifesto for earth-care, a philosophical tract that is also an art-dossier. It is literary, autobiographical, radical, wonder-book-style rapture. The genres bleed brilliantly into each other, shape-shifting as ochre is wont to do, giving flashes of ochre practices all over the globe. One moment you’re drooling over Heidi’s deft curiosity-cabinet ochre windows, the next minute you’re immersed in a concise essay about the fractured life cycles of ochre-wearing, corpse-devouring vultures. Then you flip back to my favorite, the tiny notes that go with the windows, precision mixed with protective vagueness (the location of some ochres is kept secret) or just human vagueness (sometimes memory hides things from us).

Here’s a run I especially love, from the numbered descriptions of the “Red Ochre” section:

15. Underground Red. Heavy Bone-Breaking.

Silver-gray hematite mined commercially in

Zaragoza, Spain, for red iron oxide.

(no.16 is mysteriously omitted)

17. Superfund Mine Iron.

Hematite iron ore build-up

on excavated gold and copper

ore at a Superfund site with stunning

views of the Methow valley.

18. We Don’t Know This.

19. Nourishment for Those Far

Away From Their Homes.

20. Southwest Red Ochre. Take

a 4 x 4 up a very long rock road,

but not if it will rain soon. Go

until you reach the Saguaros.

Circumambulate by foot at night

under the right moon before

entering. Eat baby food for

sugar. Ask for nothing, leave

with who you are.

Book of Earth is, at its root, an urgent handbook for loving the earth — not “Nature” or even all the verdant and furry lifeforms usually invoked by earth-lovers, but the EARTH: the big pulsing ball of rock, the molten minerals we ride on. THERE IS BLOOD IN STONES, Heidi says, and this is no fancy, no miracle. This is true, it’s the essence of life. Ochre/hematite/iron oxide courses continually between us and the planet that birthed us. We are clay, to quote that other book. Literally, spiritually, all the ways. To talk to the stars-that-bleed inside us is to remember the larger miracle that’s life — and maybe, to fight for that.

Thank you, Heidi, way more than I can say.

Coal pollutants, copper scraps, brick shards, iron oxide from rusty nails, and goldenrod lake pigment make up Pigments As Catalysts launching speaker, Hannah Chalew’s waste-stream-derived palette. Photo by Hannah Chalew.

pigments as catalysts at last

PIGMENTS AS CATALYSTS, the long-awaited Wild Pigment Project online talk series, launches in a week, on September 22 at noon PST, with our first speaker, Hannah Chalew. Hannah is the launching speaker for the series with her talk, ‘Insurgent Pigments: Engaging with Animate Materiality for a Livable Future.’

Our next speaker, Lucille Junkere’s talk, Decolonizing the Language of Colour Theory & Legacies of Colonialism In African Caribbean Textile History will be offered on October 22nd at noon PST.

I’m SOOOO looking forward to this launching talk. Hannah is a New Orleans artist working with waste-stream-derived pigments like coal tar, brick remnants, and botanical-diversity-suppressing plants like goldenrod. She makes a material she calls “plasticane” with a mixture of plastic waste and sugarcane. Her artwork explores what it means to live in a time of global warming with a collective uncertain future, and specifically what that means for those living in Southern Louisiana. Her pieces almost defy description: they’re both drawings and sculpture, and many of them have breathing, flowing, moving aspects (see below). Register HERE for her talk.

wanna throw in on this?

We’re trying something radical for this talk: we’re charging money for it (sliding scale, $11 to $44, with scholarship options). Hannah and I (and Lucille and I) have discussed this subject at length. I invited Hannah to share her feelings about it here and this is what she wrote:

“I believe it's the artist’s role to hold a mirror to our culture and help us see our world in new ways. As an artist living in an oil-and-gas state creating work that examines anthropogenic climate change, it's difficult for me to find a platform for my work where I live because all the major art institutions here are funded by fossil-fuel industries who actively censor artwork critical of their impact on the planet. Yet this is the artwork our moment desperately needs, which is why I’m thrilled that the Pigment as Catalysts series is exploring a new crowd-funded model. This model offers our community the opportunity to directly support artists in a small but meaningful way, redefining paradigms and imagining new ways forward in the process.” ~ Hannah Chalew

If you value what this new series, Pigments As Catalysts, is offering, and you’re interested in supporting radical artists who otherwise have difficulty finding support, attend and offer what you can. We’re seeing these talks also as invitations to conversation, so stick around for the group share afterwards.

Stay With Earth,

And ~ so much gratitude for all those of you who read this. I always love to hear from you. Just hit reply.

<3 Tilke

p.s. This newsletter accompanies the August pigment, Mill Town. Yeah, I’m a little behind. But time is not a so-solid thing. :) Issue No.45, which goes with this month’s pigment, Conductor Blue, will be coming your way in a couple (three?) weeks….

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pied midden : issue no. 44 : ochre voices : noel guetti