Ink Studio

Making ink from foraged materials activates our awareness of our interconnectedness with all more-than-human beings. The laborious, unpredictable, often fugitive process locates us in deep time and connection to the future and past. Working with things we find through observation and presence, ink making centers our creative practice as present in bodies, communities, and ecologies and not simply part of a colonized, capitalist factory model. When we make and create with inks, we deepen our embodied relationship to objects, beings, and ecologies, opening up new ways of knowing, sparking an animistic relationality, and cultivating a reciprocal, loving, tender presence on earth.

I’ve been making ink from foraged materials for a decade. I stumbled upon this practice during Field Station Concordia in 2013 as a way to give voice to the site. Since that time I’ve made inks for a number of different projects, including: Utopia Press, Sylvan Oracle, and for smaller projects such creating inks as gifts each month for a New Moon gathering.

Making ink locates me in place. I deepen into presence in the local ecology when I am foraging. I enter into a conversation with plants, the site, the weather, this moment as I offer gratitude to the plants.

Making ink slows me down. My process is not scientific and will rarely produce consistent results in multiple batches. Instead I work with the plants in their season with water gathered from a river or rain or snow, adding as few binders and modifiers as possible to elicit a direct color from the plant. It takes time: steeping the plant over many days to coax out the color, collecting the plant parts during foraging walks, using my solar oven to intensify the color. Making inks feels like another way of knowing our more-than-human plant kin. I hesitate to say its a collaboration, but there is some reciprocal connection between me, the plant, and the ink.

I consider the inks to be the voice of the plants. Some inks are fugitive and change with light and time. Some inks are more hearty, lasting through New England blizzards. Some inks yield more than one color with different modifiers—the moods or personalities of the plant?