A local colour palette

My neurodivergence means I have trouble forming memories – where other people can remember details from films they saw years ago, I struggle to remember if I even saw the film, sometimes getting to the end before remembering I had seen it before. It’s been a big source of frustration for me but with each pigment I make, I can remember where the material came from, what I was doing on that day, why I was there – the gathering process literally helps me ground myself in the present moment and retain memories. I have a hunch that using my hands creates a magical pathway to my brain which is why I always want to make physical things.

Making pigment from scratch is sometimes a long process with all the gathering, boiling, filtering, precipitating, washing, drying, grinding and mulling involved. The results are uncertain – perhaps the colour will be unexciting, or too transparent, maybe sticky, often not lightfast, offering small yields. But the point is to know, understand and appreciate what these plants and materials can do. Making my own materials connects my work, my environment and my sense of self, creating complex layers of meaning throughout the making processes. A bit like pairing wine with ingredients that are grown in the same area - imagine painting a landscape with colours foraged from that very place and how beautiful the relationship between the painting and the materials would be.

Furthermore, commercial art materials are notoriously opaque when it comes to formulations and while we can obtain any colour we like at the click of a button, we have no idea where the ingredients came from, or what they even are. A tube of viridian green purchased at an art store means very little to me and feels disposable – unless I pay a lot of money for a tube in which case I value it more - something I struggle with.

Making pigments from scratch costs almost nothing, but the time and care I put into them makes them so much more valuable to me than any expensive paint. I want to challenge a capitalist system that encourages wastefulness, disconnection and decreases our natural curiosity and ingenuity. I want to understand how we can deeply align our artistic practices with our values and explore what artists can make for almost free, using materials that are abundant or discarded in our environments and reveal the richness we can find on our doorsteps.