I started making inks over lockdown.  I bought an electronic version of Jason Logan’s Make Ink book and by the end of the evening, I had a copper verdigris and some iron water on the go.  It turned into a ritual.  Each morning I’d get up and ‘put on a brew’ of a different plant material.  The totally unpredictability of what colours the plants would produce mirrored what was happening in the outside world, and it helped me cope with the ‘unknown’. 

I soon realised that the vibrancy of the inks was short lived.  I made a delicate ‘baby blue’ from some bluebells but after a few days, the colour shifted towards green.  So, I started to freeze the inks. 

when I took the inks out of the trays, the residue left was concentrated, so I started making some monoprints with the leftover ink.  I had some Japanese paper and tried out some chine-collé prints.  I took out an ice cube of ink and left it on a failed print as I needed more ‘residue’ for a new one. The liquid got trapped in between the Japanese paper and the printmaking paper underneath. this was intriguing…

I set up a sheet of Shoji on a Somerset Soft White paper with an ice cube of oak gall ink and an ice cube of sycamore leaf ink and watched them as they melted.  They pooled under the paper.  I tilted the board slightly and moved it ever so slightly to make sure the whole paper was wet and then left it.  It changed huge amounts as it dried and watching ink dry became a new pastime.  I found it calming and better than watching news of the daily death toll…

I was in my final year at the University of Northampton studying Fine Art and experimented with all different combinations of papers and other substrates. At the same time I was art project lead for Watlington Climate Action Group and a member of their hedge-surveying team. We surveyed all the hedges in the parish, noting measurements, health & plant species. I began building up a seasonal collection of hedgerow inks & using these for my ice-process drawing experiments.

there are so many variations when it comes to creating natural colour. For example, the water you use, the method used and the ‘brewing time’ to extract the colour, the binders used, and, most significantly, the time of the year. An elder leaf will yield a bright green in spring, yet a bright yellow in summer. The colour produced by the plant is living too and it changes. I therefore built up a seasonal collection of hedgerow inks, and began to feel connected to the seasons through the materials.

I developed different techniques for ice-process drawing and presented the whole body of work at Oxfordshire Artweeks 2021. The process enabled me to raise awareness by provoking thought and facilitating dialogue. Hedgerows are an essential habitat, not only for wildlife & biodiversity, but also for carbon sequestration. They capture and sequester carbon above ground in their woody branches, and they sequester carbon underneath in the soil. The ice-process drawing stores colour in the paper from the top side and also from the underside, mirroring the way in which hedgerows store carbon.

the supernatant is the liquid which is left over when making a lake pigment. It is a waste stream product which usually gets thrown away but it can be used to make ice-process drawings…. more coming soon…..

to be continued

watch this space…

watch this space…

watch this space…