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True Blue: The Culpability of a Material

Natural indigo has complex undertones and an unmistakable aroma that synthetic blues do not. As many blues as indigo can be, it is clear what indigo is not.

Detail photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery

Earlier this year, author Jamaica Kincaid, art historian Cheryl Finley, and visual artist Rosana Paulino participated in a talk on art museums and the legacy of the Dutch slave trade. I “zoomed in” for their presentations and the conversation that came after. But the most striking moment, to me, was a brief exchange off to the side. A moderator made what they might’ve believed to be a passing comment, suggesting that cotton was a conspirator in European slavery. Kincaid paused to deliberately revisit it. Botany – cotton, sugarcane, spices – did not conspire, the Europeans did.

A few months later, I was in Harlem, on the second floor of a gallery operating out of a slender walk-up. I was there to see works from the True Blue series by Adebunmi Gbadebo. The gallerist, Ian, directed me upstairs to four framed artworks. They were resting on the hardwood floor, three leaned against the wall, and one against the back of a chair. I had shown up without notice. But still, Ian took his time, carefully peeling away the bubble wrap on one work that was ready to go somewhere else. True Blue refers to at least two plantations in South Carolina: the True Blue Plantation on Pawleys Island, which is currently a golf course, and the True Blue Plantation deeper inland in Fort Motte, where Gbadebo can trace her mother’s side of the family, the Ravenells. They were both rice and indigo plantations, where enslaved people cultivated indigo plants and processed those plants into blue dye. Archival documents identify 185 people of African descent enslaved on Pawleys Island – Mildred, Dolly, Little Anthony – but not much else about them. Gbadebo responded by creating abstracted portraits – ways to reconstruct their likeness using materials that can be connected to them: cotton, indigo dye, human hair donated by Black people. Blue appears in these works as a source of color, a knowledge held by skilled workers, a part of the region’s history.

One work – the one on the wall all the way to the left, and the first one my eyes settled on – had hardly any blue. Frozen in a sheet of cotton paper were mounds of kinky-curly and curly human hair in a color that I can best describe as 1B (if you know, you know). The two works on the wall just to the right had several blues. A block of mottled electric blue divided one artwork into two. And with its alternating bands of deep blue-black and white, the other artwork reminded me of tie & dye. At the boundary between the bands, the blue bled briefly, so it was never really white. I wondered which blues came from indigo and which from later, synthetic dyes. Because it’s a vat dye, where color is layered on in multiple dips, a knowledgeable dyer can make indigo’s blues anything from an icy blue to a night sky. But I was sure that electric blue wasn’t from indigo. Natural indigo has complex undertones and an unmistakable aroma that synthetic blues do not. As many blues as indigo can be, it is clear what indigo is not.

Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery

Gbadebo and I spoke in a video call the day after my visit. We spoke about kinks and curls being an artistic medium of their own. Short naps swept up from the barbershop floor are just right for paper-making. The resolute spirals and z-shaped kinks of 4b and 4c hair are just right for sculpting. And the looser, slack curls – well, she’s still learning that language. Gbadebo showed me a video of a recent trip to Forte Motte, only possible with the guidance of her cousin, Jackie Whitmore, one of several family members still living there. The video was thick with the colors of the place. There was the green brush in the family cemetery, springing up almost past their heads; and the burnt-orange silt under their feet. The cemetery is a sanctuary – land the Ravenell family inherits, hallowed ground where enslaved ancestors were buried, a place of safety in Fort Motte. Jackie stewards this land, devotedly. And of course, we spoke about blue. The color palette has indigo blues, like I’d thought, but also synthetic blue hair dyes with names that held Gbadebo’s attention: “Royal Blue,” “Blue Black,” and even “True Blue.” We talked about how indigo connects her not only to her mother’s lineage in South Carolina, but also to her father’s lineage in Nigeria, where there are proud histories of indigo-dyeing from Kano all the way south to Abeokuta. We talked about the things she is still learning – connections between indigo dyeing practices in the American South and in West Africa, what the indigo production process looked like on colonial plantations, whether to work with different forms of indigo. She’s been creating vats from indigo dried and ground into powder, dipping the cotton pulp into the vat before forming it into paper.

We spoke for almost two hours, but I was struck by something that happened early in our interview. Gbadebo noticed that the silk scarf wrapped around my head, with its tail trailing from my nape down to the crest of my back, was an indigo blue. She loves the color, still, she marveled. Through the artworks in the True Blue series, Gbadebo calls out the devastating colonial and imperialist history surrounding indigo in her family; in two South Carolina plantations; and in European, then American, slavery. Is there still room for her to love indigo’s blues? Well, the way I see it, Gbadebo sees indigo and its beautiful blues just as Kincaid described. At times, an instrument, but never an accomplice.

To hear more about the True Blue series, directly from Gbadebo, check out the True Blue short film produced by the Jon Andre company and filmed by Scott Seldon. If you’d like to experience these works in person, they’re in these public collections (though check with the institution about when it’ll be on view):

I Sang the Blues Black at Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (grid of 9) & National Museum of African Art (grid of 9) in Washington, DC
True Blue 18th Hole (grid of 21) at the Newark Museum of Art, in Newark, NJ
True Blues (grid of 18) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, MN

For more on that talk, where Kincaid, Paulino, and Finley address the legacies of American and European slavery through literature, artwork, and scholarship, the video is published online via the event sponsor, Harvard Art Museums. The 300+ year history of indigo in connection to American slavery is one part of a bigger picture, at least thousands of years old, of indigo plant species, uses, and techniques across the globe. For more indigo histories from various regions and times, refer to the lifelong work of indigo dyeing masters, educators and preservers, such as Aboubakar Fofana (who contributed a piece to this Blue issue), Chief Mrs Nike Okundaye / Nike Art Centre, Takayuki Ishii / Awonoyoh, Botanical Colors, and Threads of Life Bali. This list is not comprehensive; just a few suggestions based on my own learning experience. Lastly, thank you for taking the time to read this piece. If you have feedback, please email it to the Tatter staff, who will communicate it with me.

Interviews and research conducted November – December 2021.

Written by mary adeogun, with thanks to Helen Polson, the Claire Oliver Gallery, and Tatter editorial staff.

Adebunmi creates sculptures, prints, ceramics, and paper using historical and cultural imbued materials. Currently focused on her “True Blue and Land for Sale” series, Adebunmi investigates the complexities around land, erasure, and value in the American south. Born in New Jersey and based between Newark and Philadelphia, Adebunmi earned her BFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY.

Gbadebo’s work is included in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Newark Museum of Art. Gbadebo’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Asia, and Europe, including the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London; Untitled Art Fair, Miami; Rutgers University, New Jersey; College of Saint Elizabeth, New Jersey; amongst others. Adebunmi is a current resident at the Clay Studio. Philadelphia and represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.

To learn more about the work of Adebunmi Gbadebo visit adebunmi.carbonmade.com / @adebooms

Beyond the Blueness

I think of myself more as a farmer and a nurturer than as a dyer, because long before the blue colours ever appear, I must grow the primary material and transform it.

I’m often asked about how I see blue as a colour and what it means to me.

Frequently, the people who ask those questions are asking about a perception of colour, or a physical idea of the colour blue. But for me, the colour of much of my work can never be separated from the materials, the spirituality, or the history of the indigo plant for the people indigenous to the areas where it comes from.

The short answer to the question ‘how do you perceive the colour blue?’ is that I think more about a range of blues than I do about a single notion of blue. In classical Malian culture, an accomplished indigo dyer was able to create a minimum of twelve shades of blue. In my journey with indigo, I have given a huge amount of work to learning about these twelve shades. During his lifetime, my spiritual father, Youssouf Tata Cissé, spent much time talking to me about the names of these twelve shades and what they mean. Everything in our culture once had a name that was both its use-name and also a link to something larger – an idea, a spiritual notion, a social practice, a parable. So you can speak of the object as in everyday speech, but you can also use its name to invoke these other ideas. In Malian spiritual practice, which long predates the arrival of Islam in Africa, we say that the name came before the object it represents – that an idea is at least as important as an outcome. An idea exists before and it exists afterwards. Even if there is no one to speak it, it exists. For the shades of indigo it is no different, although for many decades, many of these names were lost or only known to very few people.

In my work, the first shade I can create is not my creation at all. It is the raw fibre before it is dyed. All of the shades that I create can only be gradated by reference to the undyed cloth. Our perception of all colours is altered by the colours around them, even when they are essentially shades of the same colour. The medium-dark shades I can create may look dark on their own until they are compared to the darkest shade of all, lomassa dunné.

But the truth of my work is that, although I am looking at the colours I create as I work, judging the shade and beauty of the blues, I am far more looking at these colours as a reflection of the health of my vats. I think of myself more as a farmer and a nurturer than as a dyer, because long before the blue colours ever appear, I must grow the primary material and transform it. I must set the vats using many kilos of dried leaves, and tend those vats until the bacteria in them grow numerous enough that they draw the pigment out of the leaf mass, and the oxygen out of the vat, forcing the reduction which allows dyeing to take place. All of these steps take many months, and caring for the bacteria in my vats is a daily practice. I cannot dye enormous amounts of fibre in my vats in any set amount of time: the vats must rest after a couple of hours of use, otherwise I will exhaust the bacteria and they will die, and the vat will fail and I will need to tip it onto my gardens. The collaboration between the bacteria and myself is not immediately apparent in the end product of my textile pieces. When the cloth is taken from the vat, and is finished and dried, and shown to someone who is not an indigo dyer who uses bacterial vats, what they see is blue.

I feel that the way that indigo dyeing is widely practiced now mislays connection to the original source material. The availability of powdered indigo pigment as a commercial product reduces contact with the plant source of the colour. For me, and for all Indigenous indigo dyers throughout the world, the creation of the colour starts in the soil and moves up to open to the sun, through the roots and leaves of the indigo plants. Even before that, it starts with my ancestors, the people who came before me and inhabited the spaces I now inhabit. These people are around me all the time. For us in Mali, as an animistic culture, all time is now, and everything that was once present is still present. I cannot move through my world and my work without being conscious of what came before me because all that came before is here with me, always. My grandmother, who was a healer, considered that the plants she used in her work were giving their souls, not just their physical properties. It is the same with my indigo vats and their outcomes of blue cloth. The souls of the indigo plants are present in the cloth.

We have many different species of indigo-bearing plants throughout Africa. Two of them, especially rich in pigment, are native to the regions of Mali and Guinea, where the practice of dyeing that I have inherited originated. It is beyond belief to think that the original human inhabitants never noticed these plants, and never used them for dyeing. I think of the dye practices of West Africa as extremely old – Western notions always demand an exact time. I can with confidence say they are very much older than Japanese traditions, which were passed to Japan from the ancient practices of China and Korea within the last thousand years. To me, logically, indigo dyeing in West Africa has existed as long as humans have existed there, which is a very long time indeed.

Photo by François Goudier

My grandmother, who was a healer, considered that the plants she used in her work were giving their souls, not just their physical properties. It is the same with my indigo vats and their outcomes of blue cloth. The souls of the indigo plants are present in the cloth.

The length of time this dyeing practice has existed can be seen in its complexity. My vats use whole leaves, lye (ash-water), a fermenting agent (like tamarind pulp, crushed date powder, or honey), cereal bran, and nothing else. Yet it took me over a decade to master the process of building a vat to the point it can be used and maintaining that vat so that the bacteria in it live for many months. Learning how to raise those bacteria and keep them healthy is a work which has consumed me, obsessed me, every day for almost my entire life. It is a work which involves all of my senses as well as all of my spirit, and it is a work which has built my life and my spiritual beliefs.

There are as many techniques of indigo dyeing as there are regions of the world where indigo grows indigenously, but the mastery of the fermented whole-leaf vat is amongst the most difficult of these techniques. I am one of a long line of indigo dyers, and my understanding of the work involves a knowledge of their work. I can say with utmost certainty that the complexity of this knowledge could never have evolved over the lifetime of one human, or even the successive lifetimes of many humans. I could not have come to my practice if it had never existed before I did. But it did exist, for many thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

In Bamanankan, the name mà ngálábá yírí translates as ‘the Creator’. The same word holds the root of the name for indigo-dyed cloth and for indigo pigment – gálá. Indigo plants are known as gálá yírí, which translates as ‘Divine Tree’. Indigo dyeing as practiced in West Africa was always deeply spiritual, and our language shows our link to indigo as divine, as deep and as old as our link to our own humanity. Still, regularly, in books I see no mention – or only a passing mention – of African indigo. Often it is called ‘Yoruba Indigo’, which deftly attributes indigo to a single cultural group inside a single country rather than associating it with hundreds of cultural groups across many countries – a reduction as colonial as the word indigo itself.

So much of the focus on indigo in the West nominates it as a dyestuff that seems to come primarily from two regions of the world, India and Japan. Even the name given to the dyestuff – ‘indigo’ in the West – reflects this belief. I rarely see the two species of indigenous African plants that I use recorded correctly in print with their Latin names – Philenoptera cyanescens and Indigofera arrecta. Almost always, one is left out, and the other is incorrectly named ‘Indigofera tinctoria‘ – Indian indigo. This reflects a common idea that indigo dyeing was brought to Africa from outside, from India. This deeply colonial idea is both damaging and widespread, and it is an impossibility, given our origins and our environment. It reflects the conception that something only exists where Westerners have been able to discover, exploit, quantify, and report on it.

The uses of indigo in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are exceptionally ancient; the ancestors are everywhere. These practices are well-documented in the West because it was this region that was first pillaged by Western colonisation for this dyestuff. It was a Western adaptation of an Indian method of dyeing, using pre-extracted pigment, that was easily transportable and could be used in inert, measurable vats which was the most easily exploitable for Western commerce. West African methods – which used whole leaves in huge quantities, and which relied on exact conditions and constant attention for the bacteria to thrive – were never exploitable. So they were cast aside.

In India, from my experience, much of the indigo powder used within the region and exported for overseas sale isn’t even of plant origin; it is petrochemical. The real cost of a kilo of indigo powder should be enormous, and the real skill of Indian textile artisans should be valued likewise, for they also are heirs to incredibly rich, ancient and exacting traditions. But generations of Western intervention have seen everything cheapened. Very few people now have the skill to know the difference, either in the dyestuff or in the blue-dyed cloth. The end result of colonialism is always a cheap, violent, banality masquerading as history, beauty, and skill. The colours may be superficially the same, but the practice and the impact can never be.

Indigo came to the New World because of colonisation, of India and of Africa. In my mind, I cannot ever separate the injustices done to the people of the Indian subcontinent from those done to my own. The scalable, measurable techniques of Indian indigo pigment dyeing were exported to the New World, but it was African knowledge of how to grow and transform indigo that allowed it to flourish, in the form of African brains in African bodies. And even in this, our knowledge was erased from the history books, while our bodies remain in their pages, to be violated over and over again, as we are referred to not by our names or by our families but by the generic word ‘slaves’.

Photo by François Goudier

It is a work which involves all of my senses as well as all of my spirit, and it is a work which has built my life and my spiritual beliefs.

The way history speaks of Eliza Pinkney offers a clear example. Pinkney was the daughter of a colonial landowner whose family controlled many enslaved African people. In history she is recorded as the person who – almost single handedly – initiated the cultivation of indigo for dye in North America. But Pinkney was 17 when she began this work. She would have known less than nothing about the growing and processing of indigo. Her father knew nothing either. It was the people her father had enslaved who knew the real work. It was they who built the beginnings of indigo trade in North America. But while Eliza Pinkney’s name is well-known, I have not come across a reference to the name of a single one of the people who did the real labor and possessed the real knowledge. Even if their names are recorded somewhere, it would not be the names they were given at birth, because everything they were born with had already been stolen.

Indigo in Mali almost completely died out after Western colonisation. The French requisitioned and broke our economy and stole control of the cotton trade from our growers, spinners, and weavers, forcing them to produce white, long-staple cotton and leaving our many species of coloured cottons to disappear. Our complex indigo-dyeing techniques were discarded and broken, too. They could not be easily reproduced, scaled-up, transported – they could not be exploited. And as the hand-spinners and weavers of our sacred cottons disappeared; our indigo dyers themselves passed into memory. By the time I was born, the knowledge was already lost.

In over thirty years of searching, I have not ever met another indigo dyer in West Africa who does not use chemicals, who understands how to build and maintain a vat using only leaves. I had to turn to colonial accounts held in the Museum of Mankind (now the Quai Branly) to learn something that should have been my inheritance. It took me almost a decade of research, of travel throughout Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Sénégal and Côte d’Ivoire, of collecting fragments and adding them to what I had learned in books, and then putting into practice what I had learned. I had so many vats fail and die, so many years of trying.

This may be a long way from the introduction of this piece, but for me, everything is a continuation. My ancestors, some of them, stayed in Africa. Some of them were stolen and taken elsewhere, but their souls remained African. Many of those taken would have been indigo dyers, and it is not unrelated that I could find no one to teach me my metier when I first began my journey into indigo. My ancestors led me to indigo because it was necessary for both of us to begin a healing – healing for myself and on behalf of my ancestors and my people. I cannot discuss my ideas of blue without discussing the history of the colour as it relates to my people, and without discussing our erasure from our own creations. For me, the blue of indigo is symbolic of many things, many deeply spiritual connections within my homeland. But it is also deeply symbolic of what colonialism has done to my region and my people, and to lands and societies elsewhere. I can talk about blue as a colour, as a shade, as an idea, as a spiritual practice. I cannot ever separate my work from my spirituality, and I equally cannot separate it from my political struggle for African liberation, which is ever-present in all my work. And when I am asked about my notions of the colour blue, as you can see, the answer is never simple.

Born in Mali and raised in France, Aboubakar Fofana is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose working mediums include calligraphy, textiles and natural dyes. He is known for his work in reinvigorating and redefining West African indigo dyeing techniques, and much of his focus is devoted to the preservation and reinterpretation of traditional West African textile and natural dyeing techniques and materials.

To learn more about the work of Aboubakar Fofana visit @aboubakarfofana

Photo by François Goudier

A Blue for Consuming

When we imagine a ripe yellow banana, one whose green ribs have just mellowed, many of us can picture what will happen when we peel away its protective skin and stringy phloem bundles, sinking our teeth into the fruit. The flavor, texture, even the smell is so familiar that we can almost cognitively taste it without touching fruit to tongue. It’s predictable. But what happens when we are met with a food so unfamiliar, so devoid of association, that we don’t know how to experience it?

Every chef faces the unpredictable variable of a diner’s receptivity. Curiosity gives a chef the ability to surprise us. To displace us. To offer our bodies, usually comfortable with the act of eating, something unexpected – something out of the blue.

Bela Gil is a culinary alchemist. She is a well-known nutritionist, chef, cookbook author, and the host of her own television show. After nearly a decade in New York City – spent pursuing culinary school and a degree in Nutrition and Food Science – Gil missed the fruits and vegetables, textures and tastes of Salvador, the capital city of Bahia in Brazil where she was born. What was abundant in Bahia was absent from New York. Returning to Brazil and relocating to Rio de Janeiro, she rediscovered her enduring childhood memories, focusing on ingredients and techniques native to her home country.

Gil brought with her an insatiable desire to learn about nonconventional edible plants that could expand what is expected of Brazilian food. She studied unripe foods – green bananas, green papayas, green jackfruits. She traveled around the Amazon, attending off-grid gatherings of women, and spent time with several indigenous communities who welcomed her to learn about food by experiencing it. Ingestion can be both an embodied and an in-body form of learning. Sometimes, new ideas for food can even be found on the body. For centuries, indigenous Brazilian communities like the Ticuna and the Ka’apor have maintained the ceremonial practice of decorating the skin with temporary surface stains made from a particular unripe fruit. A fruit with a capacity to nourish, but also, unexpectedly, for blue – jenipapo.

Curiosity gives a chef the ability to surprise us. To displace us. To offer our bodies, usually comfortable with the act of eating, something unexpected – something out of the blue.

What we choose to eat is often held in our softest yet firmest philosophical places. When met with the unexpected, we are given the chance to reevaluate our truths. Perhaps these could be more malleable than they often feel.

Large jenipapo berries emerge from genipa – Genipa americana – trees found in Central and South America. Between the boundary of skin and the seeds at its center is a fruity flesh containing genipin, an iridoid compound found in high volume before the berry has ripened. Though the language of chemistry complicates its natural poetry, what jenipapo produces is actually simple. Genipin, in the presence of oxygen, bears blue. A transitory blue. One that, when exposed to amino acids or proteins like those found in our skin, can eventually darken to black.

Gil, a plant-based chef, was eager to pursue the mysterious blue properties of jenipapo, which she knew were potent. Her first memory of eating jenipapo is sweet. Candies and syrups made from the ripe fruit sway her early recollections. However, when eaten raw without sugar, ripe jenipapo has a sour taste. Before it ripens, Gil discovered, jenipapo lacks any flavor besides bitterness. The recipes that Gil’s experiments would lead her to design would incorporate only a trace of the bitter ingredient.

First, Gil peels the green jenipapo. She cuts it into cubes. She blends it with water and strains the liquid out, using the juice to cook a protein-rich ingredient, like quinoa. Before her eyes, the blue deepens. It saturates each seed in blue. She describes a similar process for baking blue bread – though for bread, she cooks the jenipapo in a protein-rich cashew milk instead of water.

Once the jenipapo has imbued a food with its surprising blue, Gil is free to experiment with any flavors she chooses. The blue is so unexpected that even if familiar flavors follow, they will become unexpected also. Sour lemon, floral honey, spicy chili sauces can re-introduce themselves. Gil facilitates these second-meetings in her restaurant, Camélia Òdòdó.

Camélia Òdòdó promotes local ingredients across Gil’s plant-based menu. Gil’s featured recipes experiment with the powdered, algal blue of spirulina and the liquid blue of butterfly pea flowers that change from blue to pink with an acidic squeeze of lemon. Customers and diners receive the food with curiosity. Those unfamiliar with Gil’s philosophy as a chef and nutritionist wonder where the blues come from, often assuming that she must use edible synthetic dyes. Such a thought is natural when many blue foods read as poison on a primal level. But Gil is quick to dismiss the possibility of chemicals coloring her healthful food. Those who know her never question the bright colors’ origins. Instead, they take an amazed pleasure in the magic of her plant-derived blues. Gil tells her diners that blue grows humbly all around them in the unripe fruit of their jenipapo trees.

The experience of deeply nostalgic foods is turned upside down by the attempt to imagine eating something new. Memories may hold a place for foods we wish to taste again, but memory alone will never render an empty mouth full. Until our taste buds are flooded by actual remembered flavor, we are left unsatisfied – no matter how strong the familiarity and comfort, associations and pleasures, predictability of flavor or texture.

What does it mean to design someone’s first introduction to a blue food, a reference they will take with them? To offer a fullness, not only of body but also of mind? To be met with the unexpected – the total absence of memory or association – is undeniably powerful. What we choose to eat is often held in our softest yet firmest philosophical places. When met with the unexpected, we are given the chance to reevaluate our truths. Perhaps these could be more malleable than they often feel.

When offering a new experience, one so intimate as to go into the mouth and be absorbed by the body, Gil finds that making food beautiful is essential. Especially as a plant-based chef, she knows that visual appeal invites people in – convincing us that food is palatable. Making us curious enough to taste, to consider. Allowing us to meet our plate with openness. Consuming blue – natural, jenipapo blue – might do more than help us expand our relationships with food. Jenipapo can help us understand and embody blue.

Bela Gil generously offers us each her recipe for exploring the unexpected, for tasting natural, jenipapo blue.

Tabule de Quinoa com Jenipapo Verde
Courtesy of Bela Gil.
Rendimento: 4 porções
Tempo de preparo: 40 minutos
Nível de dificuldade: elaborada

Ingredientes
50g de jenipapo verde
500ml de água
1 xícara de quinoa branca
2 pepinos picados
2 tomates picados
1 cebola picada
1/2 xícara de chá de hortelã picada
2 limões
1 colher de chá de cominho em pó
azeite de oliva, pimenta do reino e sal a gosto

Modo de preparo
Bata o jenipapo e a água no liquidificador, peneire e reserve
Numa panela média, coloque a quinoa, o sumo do jenipapo e o sal
Deixe cozinhar por 15min em fogo baixo, com a panela tampada
Apague o fogo e acerte o sal
Numa tigela grande, misture todos os ingredientes
Prove o tempero e sirva.

Quinoa Tabbouleh with Green Genipapo
Courtesy of Bela Gil. Translation courtesy of Helena Whitaker.
Yield: 4 servings
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Difficulty level: elaborate

Ingredients
50g of green genipapo
500ml of water
1 cup of white quinoa
2 chopped cucumbers
2 chopped tomatoes
1 chopped onion
1/2 cup of chopped mint
2 lemons
1 teaspoon of cumin powder
olive oil, black pepper, and salt to taste

Method of preparation
Blend genipapo and water in blender, pass through sieve and save juice
In a mid-sized pot, mix the quinoa, juice of genipapo and salt
Let simmer for 15 minutes. Keep covered.
Turn off the heat.
In a large bowl, mix all ingredients,
Make any adjustments to spices and serve.

Bela Gil is a chef, nutritionist, activist and author of 5 bestselling books in Brazil. Her career has spanned many fields: food, television and media, healthcare, women’s rights, public policy, and education. She hosts a cooking show where she visits small organic farms, teaches the principles of agroecology and cooks for Brazilian celebrities and Bela just opened the vegetarian restaurante Camélia Òdòdó in São Paulo. Bela’s goal is to raise awareness about the importance of healthy cooking and eating in order to sustain a harmonious life and planet.

She graduated with a BS in Nutrition from Hunter College and a diploma in Culinary Art’s from the Natural Gourmet Institute, both in New York. In 2019 she got a Master degree of Gastronomy at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy.

To learn more about the work of Bela Gil visit belagil.com / @belagil

Why, Blue?

Why blue?

This question vexed my early years of devotion to indigo dye. I wanted to put everything into the dye vat, to make my whole world a living blue. I was in love and didn’t want my beloved held up to questioning or inspection. But my peers and mentors found this perplexing, and perhaps even concerning, so “why blue?” followed me around like a prod. I’m grateful for this now, because the questioning forced me to go deeper, to adopt approaches to my making and research that were open-minded, critical, and receptive. Today, over 15 years from my first dip of silk into indigo, in a period of my studio practice that is noticeably indigo-free, I still regard it as the singular medium with which I am in a committed long-term relationship.

I admitted that I didn’t always know why, that indigo exerted a pull on me that was often inexplicable, and that it was a substance I felt I could never exhaust.

I recall a particularly helpful studio visit with Anne Wilson while I was in grad school. After looking around my studio and witnessing the loaves of indigo-dyed bread and various other blue-stained items, she invited me into another “why blue?” conversation. I admitted that I didn’t always know why, that indigo exerted a pull on me that was often inexplicable, and that it was a substance I felt I could never exhaust. She regarded this seriously and affirmed that there is something powerful and generative about dedication to a singular medium, that for artists this kind of deep well can take us to the places we don’t yet know we need to visit.

Collaboration of Craft Mystery Cult (Sonja Dahl, Jovencio de la Paz, Stacy Jo Scott). Photos by Sonja Dahl.

Collaboration of Craft Mystery Cult (Sonja Dahl, Jovencio de la Paz, Stacy Jo Scott). Photo by Sonja Dahl.

Rebecca Solnit has written movingly about “the blue of distance”, blue as not only the color of the atmosphere between you and a distant place, but also as a state of mind, as the color of desire for the unattainable. “Blue”, she writes, “is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in”. If desire has a color, I have to agree it must be blue. The blues I have worked with arrive as mysteries; an indigo-dyed object blooms blue with the kiss of oxygen, a cyanotype print captures the light of the sun and bleeds into blue in a bath of water. These blues are active, elemental, and transformative. Is it any wonder so many people across space and time have fallen under their spells, have leaned their entire beings precariously into that distant, unattainable space of blue? Solnit uses the metaphor of a friend arriving on your doorstep from far away: “when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around a mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all, we hardly know our depths.”*

Reflecting on these things, it occurs to me that this restlessness, this desire to reach unattainable blue places, to grasp at mysteries, is an apt explanation of the creative process. It is the artist’s job to constantly open doors and step through them into the blue beyond, leaving crumb trails for their viewers to follow. Sometimes we lose our way, but that is unsurprising when travelling with companions such as desire and longing.

Is it any wonder so many people across space and time have fallen under their spells, have leaned their entire beings precariously into that distant, unattainable space of blue?

Collaboration of Craft Mystery Cult (Sonja Dahl, Jovencio de la Paz, Stacy Jo Scott). Photo by P.D. Rearick.

To desire indigo, is, I have found, no innocent thing. At some point in my “why blue?” travels it occurred to me to turn the question on indigo itself. Why, blue, are you regarded as such a spiritually dangerous and unstable substance in many cultures, tended to with respect and care? And why, blue, have you inspired so much desire to consume, that they would lay claim to human lives and land not their own, all in order to pull your blueness out of the void and into the marketplace? Blue’s answers to these questions have always been: “look deeper, submerge your face under the surface of my blueness and turn around. You will see the mirror.”

If I am in a committed relationship with blue, I cannot look away from what I see in that mirror. It is rarely comfortable to regard one’s own desires so frankly. But to be in a relationship with someone or something means you have entered into a form of mutuality and responsibility. The “why blue?” question has forced me to take responsibility for my workings with indigo, submerging myself within the broader contexts of its many cultural specificities and fraught histories. Indigo has held its mirror up to me so many times through my years of working with it that I finally realized I am not a solitary guide for my own creative process. I may work with indigo, work with cyanotypes, or weaving, or embroidery, but more importantly, I’ve come to understand that these materials are working with me. I am also raw material, shaped by the attentions and efforts of these materials I have come to love. Why, blue, have you consented to walk by my side all this distance?

Blue turned at this question and beckoned to me from far away. “Come, I will show you.”

* Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Penguin Books. 2005.

Photo by Molly Evans Fox and Sonja Dahl

Bread and Dye

A conversation between Sonja Dahl and Jovencio de la Paz.**

“Food is so related to our bodies. And textiles are so related to our bodies. And therefore you can extrapolate how they’re related to lived experience.”

Listen to “Bread and Dye”, a conversation between Sonja Dahl and Jovencio de la Paz.

This interview between Jovencio de la Paz and Sonja Dahl is part of a podcast series de la Paz initiated in 2019 to record intimate conversations with artists about their making processes. In this conversation de la Paz and Dahl discuss various aspects of Dahl’s creative process, from early, formative artworks involving her mouth as a mark-making tool, to reflections on fermentation in bread baking and indigo dyeing, and its allegorical power as a transformative process for both art and culture. This is also a document of Dahl and de la Paz’s intertwining reflections about the nature of the creative process itself, as both individual artists and thinkers, and as longtime collaborators.

“When we...looked at the Blue rice, something just fell open inside of me...it stayed with me for all these years.”

** “Bread and Dye” is an interview originally commissioned by the Critical Craft Forum in 2019.

Photo by Molly Evans Fox and Sonja Dahl

Sonja Dahl is an artist, writer and lecturer of contemporary art at the University of Oregon. Her work critically explores the cultural, historic, metaphoric and embodied aspects of how textile processes such as indigo dyeing, whitework embroidery and patchwork quilting live within and reflect the values of human societies. She conducts her research and art making from a situated acknowledgement and critical engagement with her white, American, settler identity. She is a founding member of Craft Mystery Cult, a member of Ditch Projects artist-run space in Springfield, OR, and a continuing collaborator with Babaran Segaragunung Culture House in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her arts research projects and subsequent collaborations in Indonesia (2012 – ongoing) are supported by the Fulbright Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council. Sonja’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing is published in peer-reviewed journals as well as printed and online arts publications.

To learn more about the work of Sonja Dahl visit sonjakdahl.com

Jovencio de la Paz is an artist, weaver, and educator. Their current work explores the intersecting histories of weaving and modern computers. Jovencio is currently Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon.

To learn more about the work of Jovencio de la Paz visit jovenciodelapaz.org

The Story of a Blue Mushroom

The story of how I met the blue mushroom starts with growing up in Latvia, a country where the national sport is not football, but rather mushroom picking. As soon as the first photos of chanterelles appear on Facebook feed, almost every casual conversation involves questions like: did you go mushroom picking this weekend? Are you freezing or drying the mushrooms this year? Which forest did you forage in?

The location of the best mushroom spots is a flirtatious secret shared only with closest friends and family members. Sometimes not even. My grandma still ventures off to her Penny Bun spot, whose whereabouts none of us know, to collect the edible boletes. Playful bragging is part of the tradition. When crossing paths with another mushroomer, there is a saying: “each mushroomer has their own mushroom to find,” meaning that one can find only those mushrooms that are calling to you, the forager. It is surprisingly true. The knowledge of edible mushrooms is passed from generation to generation by weekend walks in the forest. Usually, however, it is limited to a dozen or so edible species. The rest are simply called “dog mushrooms.”

This year foraging changed. A book written by two Latvian mycologists compiled all mushrooms that can be found in Latvian forests in one Big Latvian Mushroom Book. The fungi encyclopedia has not only a five star rating system for tastiness but also includes all inedible mushrooms, and very detailed instructions on how to recognize species by look, location, smell, and sometimes even taste when lightly touched to the tongue. The book seems to rekindle traditions, inviting mushroom hunters to look beyond a few edible species – to become observers in a curiosity game, where the ability to identify is just as exciting as eating. It is worth noting that the mushrooms that are picked are only the fruiting bodies of the organism’s vast mycelium found underground – which is why they keep appearing in the same spot year after year. Mushroom picking is not harmful for the reproduction of fungi. Arguably, the forager helps the organism by spreading its spores.
So there I was, escaping lockdown through the pages of a printed Latvian forest. Flickering through this new book, I noticed a mushroom that looked like nothing I had seen before. It was a photo of bright, blue coloured wood and small cup-shaped turquoise mushrooms. “Wow,” I thought, “that must be a bit of Photoshop and loads of luck to find one.” To my surprise, underneath the stunning photo was written: “commonly found.” From that moment, my forest walks were dedicated to finding Chlorociboria aeruginascens, the Blue-Green Elf Cup. Finally, on one fall day, I found a piece of wood stained blue. I knew immediately what that blue stain would lead to. Stunningly bright turquoise, with a few tiny cups emerging, was Chlorociboria – the extraordinary blue mushroom.

The location of the best mushroom spots is a flirtatious secret shared only with closest friends and family members. Sometimes not even.

Under the microscope, the mushroom’s intricate mycelium net had crawled throughout the fiber and carried pigment with it. It was like my friend was finally beginning to respond to my questions.

My interest in the blue mushroom was more than a curiosity. I’m a textile designer and I have seen the complex journey raw materials go through to become colourful fabric. It is jumbled and – even with the best of efforts – it is a system that is untraceable and inherently unsustainable. In my practice, I look to nature’s processes to create materials, cloth, and colour. Colour, in particular, is a painful topic for those who are working towards sustainability, as the environmental cost of synthetic dyes is very high. It is estimated that one-fifth of global water pollution comes solely from textile finishing. Yet there are not many alternatives to synthetic dyes that demonstrate equal vibrance and the ability to retain the shade after the endless washes we have grown used to. For that reason, the textile sustainability crisis itself has sometimes been called “a crisis of color”.

When I observed that this extraordinary mushroom colours wood in vibrant, colourfast turquoise, I first needed to start a conversation with it. When found in nature, most microorganisms cohabit the smallest spaces; separating them is a challenge. Eventually, after a few unsuccessful isolation attempts, I asked a mushroom library to send me a sample from their collection.

When I received my new-to-be best friend in a glass vial, I did not recognize it. The turquoise blue was absent. Instead, there was a small dot of contented white fluff. I soon learned that the pigment produced by an Elf Cup is a response to stress; so when the mushroom is happy and healthy, it looks white and fluffy. It is theorized that the production of pigment could be a way to protect its food source from other organisms. The human eye perceives this most obviously as a stained wood inhabited by the Elf Cup – usually a mushroomer’s first clue that Chlorociboria is growing there.

For the next few months, I became friends with the mushroom – finding out what food it eats, which temperature it’s comfortable in, and the vessel it prefers to live in. Then, slowly, I changed the environment, and introduced textiles, yarns, and other fibers as its new home. It was especially important to develop a feel for when my new friend was happy, slightly stressed, or unwell, because the colouring only occurs in particular stages of the spectrum. The mushroom grows serenely at its own – imperceptibly slow – speed. Often I was left dreaming of a time machine that could speed up the blue growth according to my wishes. But warping time was not possible. So instead, my research was planned, and deadlines were moved to suit the pace of the blue mushroom.

Only after half a year of friendship did I see the first blue spot on a piece of yarn – the miracle that I had been waiting for. Under the microscope, the mushroom’s intricate mycelium net had crawled throughout the fiber and carried pigment with it. It was like my friend was finally beginning to respond to my questions.

Photo by Liene Kazaka

The location of the best mushroom spots is a flirtatious secret shared only with closest friends and family members. Sometimes not even.

Perhaps, in the end, what matters most is our relationships with the environment and the source of our color.

Since this initial appearance of blue, I have worked to explore further the release of a turquoise pigment into the objects the Elf Cup grows on, observing the patterns created by its spread across the fabric. The blue-green pigment produced by the mushroom has shown equal colour fastness measurements to commercial dyes, allowing me to imagine a future where fabric is coloured solely by living organisms that need only a small amount of water and nutrients.

It’s important to mention that I am not the only one to fall in love with this particular fungi. Found on a forest floor, blue wood stained by the elf cup has long been used in woodwork design and mosaics. In the Renaissance, the blue stained wood was seen as a mysterious phenomenon of nature. But, like many natural colourants, it was forgotten when synthetic dyes became available. While it was known that fungi are responsible for the coloured wood, the colouring process was not entirely understood or explored. Today, scientists and innovators are looking into the world of fungi, seeking understanding, and perhaps discovering useful knowledge that can be used for a better future.

The bond I developed with my mushroom was much like a gardener has with their plants. The feeling of nurturing followed every step of the way, from selecting what to grow, to learning cultivation, and finally to harvesting. How would the world change if all manufacturing and design were undertaken with the feeling of nurturing? What if we saw the living things as our kin and the planet as our garden? Perhaps, in the end, what matters most is our relationships with the environment and the source of our colour.

The possibility of looking at my turquoise clothing and understanding blue’s origin as a playful collaboration with the blue mushroom excites me. The re-discovery of an intimacy with colours offers me hope for preserving colour in textiles. Well – blue at least.

Liene Kazaka is a designer and researcher who works on projects exploring material-based storytelling through investigative topics around sustainability across multiple disciplines. She is particularly interested in working with living systems in search of better fabrication methods that carry a story of human-nature relationships.

After graduating BA Textile design (First Class Honours) in Heriot Watt University, Scottish Borders she has worked as a woven textile designer for a luxury market where she gained experience in the traditional and current textile manufacturing methods. To satisfy the curiosity of alternative design approaches, she continued her education in MA Material Futures at Central St Martins. While studies, Kazaka’s practice turned towards an interdisciplinary approach and experimental material research. Her latest project Myco Colour explores living fungi to colour materials – a new and sustainable dyeing method.

To learn more about the work of Liene Kazaka visit lienekazaka.com / @liene_kazaka

Photograph by Emils Kalis

Top left photo by Liene Kazaka.
Bottom left photo by Maël Hénaff.
Right photo by Maël Hénaff.

The Blue of Time^Object^Conduit

Jessie Rose Vala had a neon childhood. The buzzing colors of neon gas trapped in vacuum tubes cast vivid colors across the 1980s. And that particular glow, often a blue one, now saturates many object emergences in Vala’s practice. Neon blue is in its element when it meets Vala’s science fiction inspirations, beautifully out of its depth when introduced to ancient mythos. In this contradictory space, underworld meets speculative future, solid stoneware meets vibrating neon, and stable blues meet liminal blue portals. Jessie Rose Vala’s world is potent. It’s drenched in mysteries both ancient and future – where to be a time traveler is normal and to be fixed in any singular era is far less so.

Time^Object^Conduit is a four-channel video piece that acts as a vessel to hold those three words, like a microcosm of Vala’s practice. Objects imbued with mythological meaning and spiritual purpose circulate throughout the video. Ancient Cypriot vessels rotate and pass through select frames. They become crisp in view before fading back into the layers of video patterned with glimmering, blue water.

Jessie Rose Vala’s world is potent. It’s drenched in mysteries both ancient and future - where to be a time traveler is normal and to be fixed in any singular era is far less so.

Time^Object^Conduit was originally made for an installation at Reese Bullen Gallery in Arcata, California. This iteration was commissioned by Faten Kanaan and Fire Records to be paired with Kanaan’s song, “Sleepwalker”. The song appears on Kanaan’s album, A Mythology of Circles. The side of the album on which this song appears is thought of as the underworld and dream state in which the cycles of nature and time are explored.

Ceramic sculpture with blue neon lights.

Ceramic tree sculpture with neon lights.

A pointed ellipse shape flickers above one of the vases – a familiar shape soon repeated in the watchful eyes of the Mask of Warka. Known also as Lady of Uruk, named for the ancient city of Sumer located in present-day Iraq, her eyes were likely made with white shells detailed by blue Lapis Lazuli irises and pupils. These materials would have been fastened into the pointy, ellipse-shaped space made for each watchful eye—the same shape, serendipitously, as a single indigo seed. In Vala’s piece, the eyes remain negative space. Instead of Lapis Lazuli or another opaque material, layers of shimmering water are both what is seen and what is performing the act of seeing.

The Mask of Warka was possibly a depiction of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess, Inanna, who made her mythological dwelling in Heaven. Perhaps, however, Inanna longs for a conduit to reach the deep blue below the atmospheric overhead. Maybe she could feel more at home in the underworld of the quiet ocean? Where soft bodies live and most creatures produce their own light? Tears of Inanna, a white ceramic work, absorbs and reflects the glowing blue of its environment, the blue liquid crystal display (LCD) and the buzzing neon that pours in and out. The ceramic, solid stone that has undergone alchemical processes and extreme heat, is brought to life with the ringing blue neon – a difficult, near-impossible color to catch with the human eye.

The challenge of perceiving blue clearly is physiological: blue is something always to chase and never to grasp.

Blue vibrates. An explanation exists for the difficulty of seeing this light – fewer cones and rods in our eyes can perceive this area of the spectrum. The challenge of perceiving blue clearly is physiological: blue is something always to chase and never to grasp. Running after blue is a game without an end. Searching for crisp edges and only ever arriving at the blurry fringe. Perhaps blue is like Inanna, most comfortable in motion. Or a conduit to hold other beings while they are in motion.

In Vala’s video work and ceramic pieces, numinous blue welcomes us through portals dressed as neon arches and ancient, watery eyes. It is no accident that Vala’s portals are often found in the water. Liquid liminal bodies of waves, pools, and tears connect to one another around the world beyond space and time. They are an origin of life and an eventual destination. Blue – aquatic blue – guides the way.

Liquid liminal bodies of waves, pools, and tears connect to one another around the world beyond space and time. They are an origin of life and an eventual destination. Blue - aquatic blue - guides the way.

Jessie Rose Vala (born 1977, Madison, Wisconsin) is a multimedia artist working in sculptural ceramics, video, drawing and installation. Vala received an MFA from University of Oregon and a BFA in ceramic sculpture from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad includingTruck Gallery (Calgary, Canada), V1 Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark), Present Company (Brooklyn, NY), and Reese Bullen Gallery at Humboldt State CA. She has received grants and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, PICA, the Ford Family Foundation, Archie Bray amongst others. Vala is the founder of Ungrund Collective, a collective of female video artists who curate screenings nationally and is currently career faculty at University of Oregon.

To learn more about the work of Jessie Rose Vala visit jessierosevala.com / @jessierosevala

Syrian-Palestinian-Jordanian-Lebanese

b. Walsrode, Germany.

Brooklyn-based composer, musician, and producer Faten Kanaan builds up cyclical patterns in her music, using harmony and counterpoint as narrative tools. Sound & silence become intuitive gestures that tell a wordless story. Inspired by cinematic forms and literary structures: from sweeping landscapes and quiet romances, to patterned tensions and dream sequences; she focuses on bringing an earthy, visceral touch to electronic music. In symbiosis with technology is an appreciation for the vulnerability of human limitations and nuances.

To learn more about the work of Faten Kanaan visit fatenkanaan.com / @fatenkanaan

Blue Continuum

The journey to create this long blue swath of cloth is a marker of time, of confusion, of epiphanies, of physical pain, of endurance, of curiosity.

Blue Continuum

Most of our book, Journeys in Natural Dyeing, is about sampling, collecting, documenting, and archiving moments between the bond and impression of nature and time upon cloth in the form of color, texture, and shape. The book describes the practice of possibility and wonder, reflecting our own need for quiet and connection to nature in a loud, busy world. It portrays our desire to be self-reliant in a world where we have been made to believe that we need a plethora of material objects to survive. The journey to create this long blue swath of cloth is a marker of time, of confusion, of epiphanies, of physical pain, of endurance, of curiosity.

Adrienne and I have been together since 2002. And our shared love of joint projects has kept us going. The practice of growing and processing indigo into dye combines our familial histories; Adrienne’s parents and grandparents worked in the California fields harvesting produce; my family sewed clothing and homewares in the Midwest. So both of us appreciate and feel connected with our food and our clothing: where they come from and those who are involved in their making.

Indigo blue has long been my favorite color, and it reminds me of water. My mind tends to churn, to crunch, to chew; and even the smallest amount of water calms and soothes. I spent my childhood in Minnesota, surrounded by lakes, each season relishing the various textures and colors of the waters. Coming to California, meeting the Pacific Ocean for the first time, I felt a deep pull and a desire to spend time, to study its moods, and the ways in which its color shifts based upon depth and light. Though I rarely touch the chilly water, the briskness of the wind coming off the ocean while I walk on the beach cleanses whatever hot thoughts cross my mind, a reprieve from my mental will to grind. My internal temperature is reset. I can rest.

The first indigo vat I made used indigo pigment, extracted in India from the Indigofera tinctoria plant. For indigo pigment to become water soluble and attach to cloth, the pH of the vat must be raised, and the amount of oxygen reduced. Making this first vat, we used lye and sodium hydrosulphite, a chemical process that takes about 30 minutes. Once the vat is complete, the dyeing process can begin: dipping material into the vat for five minutes, removing it, and allowing it to rest for five minutes. This process is repeated to create darker shades.

The more I learn and understand the way the natural world works, the more at ease I feel in the world. Discovery engages my mind, and quiets the churn.

Adrienne and I began to wonder more about the connection between indigo pigment and the plant that it comes from, wanting to understand the process of extraction. We learned that a variety of plants contain the pigment, and that there are myriad ways that people extract the indigo to create vats and dye textiles. We began to wonder if there could be a way to complete this process in a natural way, locally.

Learning a new process is punctuated by joyful surprises along the way. So much of how we created this textile has involved working our way through the nuts and bolts of learning basic chemistry. I had zero interest in chemistry while in school, so I was shocked to discover how curious I was. The more I learn and understand the way the natural world works, the more at ease I feel in the world. Discovery engages my mind, and quiets the churn.

The textile featured is a marking of the seasons. The process starts on January 1st, at our home in Oakland, California. In our front yard, we have a small patch of land. We till the soil and plant fava beans to fix nitrogen in the soil. After a couple months, we harvest, chop, and till the fava into the soil. We then plant Persicaria tinctoria. Over the Summer, we harvest the plant twice, removing the leaves from the stalks, drying them, and chopping them into small pieces. Over three months, we compost the leaves into a material resembling dirt, monitoring the heat of the compost, and rotating it at least once a week to ensure that it degrades evenly. In the Fall and Winter, we dye. We take hard wood ash – procured from a local restaurant with a wood-fired oven – and pour water through it to create an alkaline bath. We combine the compost with this water and add wheat bran and limestone, slowly, incrementally, for about two weeks, observing the signs of fermentation in the vat. Once the vat is full and fermenting, it is of dire importance to keep the bacteria within it healthy, because they are what make the indigo water-soluble, giving us blue. Only a few hundred grams of cloth can be dipped a day. This process is based upon that practiced at BUAISOU in Tokushima, Japan.

Like all natural bodies of water, this indigo vat is temperamental and ever-changing. It is responsive and reactive. We converse.

Our method calls for 100 square feet of space, the amount that we have in our front yard, and a quantity that we felt others without access to land could locate through a community garden. Our process differs from BUAISOU’s (and many others) in scale. While BUAISOU composts about 300 pounds of dry leaves at a minimum, we use 40 pounds. Their process requires 1800 pounds of freshly harvested plants, land, labor, and coordination, whereas a single person could complete ours, alone. I work often with the public, and a desire for balance encourages me to work independently in my practice. I have chronic pain from years of overworking my body to create textiles, so to work on a small scale is also imperative to the health of my body.

Experimenting with the composting and fermenting on this smaller scale initially caused trepidation, as both processes typically benefit from critical mass. However, step by step, the pieces came together, and in our book we have documented complete instructions to work on a much smaller scale. We hope this will allow many others to access the incredible process of creating homegrown indigo.

The gradient of blues upon the textile shows the shades of blue possible with the vat, and reflects how many dips into the indigo vat it has made over how many days. This piece of cloth was dipped into the indigo vat three times a day for fifteen days, successively, moving down the cloth in two inch increments.

Like all natural bodies of water, this indigo vat is temperamental and ever-changing. It is responsive and reactive. We converse. I am drawn to the mystery of learning what it wants to offer daily when I check its temperature, feel its viscosity, and learn how to care for it. The range of blues from this type of vat is vast. This process that combines water, air, heat, and time: to witness and be with these common elements is to witness and be with my humanity. My breath. My mortality.

Kristine Vejar is a natural dyer, gardener, artist, teacher, and author of The Modern Natural Dyer. She and her wife, Adrienne Rodriguez co-wrote Journeys in Natural Dyeing and co-own A Verb for Keeping Warm, a center for textiles located in Oakland, California. Their work focuses on plants, textiles, and the act of making as a sustainable art practice that highlights the beauty of nature and the preservation of textile techniques. They enjoy meeting people from around the world who also love and care for nature and community via textiles. When not in their studio, they can be found with their dog, Calliope Piccolo, foraging for mushrooms in the woods, or taking in the Pacific Ocean’s vast beauty.

To learn more about the work of Kristine Vejar visit averbforkeepingwarm.com / @avfkw

A Sound of Blue: Familiar Frequencies

Photo by Taylor Aldridge. Sound by Ash Arder.

Sometimes my heart is tuned to a frequency that makes my body vulnerable. The Blues show me how to make this condition - this visceral reality - into shelter.

Sometimes I am walking or driving or biking in familiar or unfamiliar towns. Sometimes when I am in transit like this or like that, I become tuned to a frequency so familiar I barely notice. The tuning first occurs in my heart, gradually sending signals to the rest of my body. When my eyes close, I know I am in tune. When my eyes close, I realize that my mouth has already been moving. That my spirit has already received the transmission. I wonder then just how long, and how loud, I have been singing. How long is long? How loud is loud anyway? This frequency is a trickster, laughing at the self-conscious adults that children with The Blues have become. This frequency shows me myself. That is how things work on this channel. Never will it show me you, or you me. Unless you are me. Sometimes, I am my father. Growing up, he was also my mother. A man and his daughter, in transit with The Blues.

“Got only one heart. One heart with no spare. Must save it for loving…somebody who cares. So you ain’t…gonna bother…me no more.” My heart knows this song better than my ears do. (“No More” by Billie Holiday)

My mother transitioned just one month before my first birthday from a condition that weakened her heart. She left behind a man and a daughter both with The Blues. My childhood home was blue. So was my father’s Cadillac.

“Blue gardenia…now I am alone with you. And I am also blue.” My heart learned this song before my mind did. (“Blue Gardenia” by Dinah Washington)

Sometimes I am in transit, and my heart recognizes a childhood friend. The heart is friendly with entities imperceptible to the eye. Broadcast #3, like many of my public-facing creative projects, is a student of and family member to The Blues. Sometimes my heart is tuned to a frequency that makes my body vulnerable. The Blues show me how to make this condition – this visceral reality – into shelter.

Photo by Carlson Productions

Sometimes I am in transit and my heart tunes to a frequency so familiar to me I barely notice. Sometimes I get The Blues in public. Sometimes when we get The Blues we are killed.

Listen to Ash Arder read “The Bewitching Bag, or How the Man Escaped from Hell” by Henry Dumas.

One of my greatest fears as a child was the Devil. I didn’t grow up in a very religious household, but there was a Christian framework around many of the warnings and lessons I received as I ventured out into the world. Both sides of my family are from Baptist Southern roots, and often the Devil was the scapegoat for misfortune and evil. As I began to create deeply personal work inside of institutions rooted in systems of white supremacy, I began to consider my relationship with The Blues. How might I protect a heart tuned to a frequency of vulnerability from institutions tuned to frequencies of greed and extraction – especially in relation to Black stories? Broadcast #3 is a sculpture that, when activated with sound, becomes a literal tool for transporting living and organic matter from one place to the next. Road of Grace was composed as a present-day reflection on Henry Dumas’ short story The Bewitching Bag or How the Man Escaped from Hell. It is a parable embedded in sound. Entertainment for some, and a warning and lesson for others. Though this work was created several years ago during my time as a graduate student in a wealthy suburb of Detroit, the invitation to reflect on it has come at a particularly appropriate time. I am thirty-three years old. The same age Dumas was when he was killed by transit police in a case of mistaken identity. A Black man killed on his journey from one place to the next just as his career was gaining momentum.

Sometimes I am in transit and my heart tunes to a frequency so familiar to me I barely notice. Sometimes I get The Blues in public. Sometimes when we get The Blues we are killed.

“It’s not a place. This country is to me a sound of drum and bass. You close your eyes to look around.” (“XXX” by Kendrick Lamar featuring U2)

Photo by Carlson Productions

Photo by Ash Arder

Ash Arder (b. 1988, Flint, Michigan) is a transdisciplinary artist whose research-based approach works to expose, deconstruct or reconfigure physical and conceptual systems – especially those related to ecology and/or industry. Arder manipulates physical and virtual environments to explore mark making, mechanical portraiture and sound design as tools for complicating dynamics of power between humans, machines and the lands they occupy.

To learn more about the work of Ash Arder and listen to Side A of their album, Road of Grace, visit asharder.com / @asharderstories

A Blue of Shelter

Somewhere over the sea, on a return flight back from Lisbon to her home in Wisconsin, a blue airplane throw casually warming her lap, it occurs to artist Sarah FitzSimons that the ocean covers our earth, like a blanket.

It’s one of those particularly loud thoughts, and as it eventuates and strengthens, it becomes a current which gyres the artist through the next five years. FitzSimons has been in creative dialogue with the ocean since 2004, when a temporary sculpture entitled Tide Bed connected the artist’s bedroom and daily pattern of sleep to the rhythmic movements of the sea, through an actual, steel-anchored bed strategically placed onto the shore to receive the tide. Ten years later, gifted with an aerial view 35,000 feet above the blue, FitzSimons is privy to a waterbody’s vast embrace of our planet, and is compelled to articulate the ocean she feels most connected to, in 625 square feet of carefully quilted yardage.

The ocean covers our earth, like a blanket.

Photo by Sarah FitzSimons

“Both water and fabric flow. Both cover. Both can conceal, reveal, and shift.”

Pacific Quilt is the result of five years of this labor. Mammoth in size, Pacific Quilt floods its way across a gallery floor, unabashedly offering us a blue gesture as abundant as the sea itself. Rigorous mapping and imaging direct the exact design of the work. Nine shades of blue fabric and layers of appliqué correlate to the exact depths of this ocean, and painstakingly pursue a topographical re-creation of this part of our earth. As the quilt stretches, its perimeter endeavors to reach west towards Asia, along the way engulfing New Zealand, crowning along the Russian shore, doubling back to North and South America and resting the soles of its feet on the Antarctic ice shelf. The running stitches that quilt the fabric layers together echo the current patterns of our planet’s largest ocean, breaching the top layer of cloth and submerging back down like schools of porpoises and fish.

Originally raised on Lake Erie, and more recently a contented coastal dweller of both California and Portugal, FitzSimons relocated to Madison, Wisconsin in 2011. Pacific Quilt reflects the artist’s desire to pack her beloved ocean into a suitcase and bring it with her. A desire to retain the spiritual possibilities of the blue horizon vista from both her childhood lake and her years by the sea. In conversation with the artist she reminds us that this ocean will inevitably reach the Midwest through the weather. She quotes oceanographer Silvia Earle: “With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.”

With this in mind, FitzSimons finds the functional connotations inherent to the medium of quilting to be an apt metaphor. The ocean is, after all, also a functional object, filling our lungs with its life-sustaining vapor, showering us with its tides of rain, hosting an endless source of protein and nutrients. FitzSimons also adds: “Both water and fabric flow. Both cover. Both can conceal, reveal, and shift.” Both require mending when their soft middles are worn and their coastlines frayed. A quilt’s edges, stitched topographies, and bathymetric depths form an insulating shelter. They protect. They hold. They warm. The ocean is a shelter, too – a rhythmic blue that blankets our planet as we spin together through space.

“With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live.”

Photo by Sarah FitzSimons

Sarah FitzSimons creates sculptural objects which interact with and derive meaning from their surroundings. Though diverse in form and material, much of her creative work explores a merging of interior and exterior spaces – both in physical and psychological terms. She exhibits in cities across the U.S. and internationally, and has developed site-specific projects for the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Vadehavsfestival (Denmark); Casa da Inquisição Monsaraz (Portugal); and Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Woodside, CA). Recent group exhibitions included her work at the Alps Art Academy (Switzerland); Casa das Artes, Tavira (Portugal); and the Grand Rapids Art Museum (MI). She’s had recent solo shows at Hawthorn Contemporary (Milwaukee, WI), the Woodson Art Museum, (Wausau, WI), and the Nona Jean Hulsey Gallery (Oklahoma City, OK. FitzSimons is the recipient of an Efroymson Contemporary Art Fellowship and grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell and the Vermont Studio Center, and earned an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal.

To learn more about the work of Sarah FitzSimons visit sarahfitzsimons.net / @sarahfitzsimons.art

Photo by Sarah FitzSimons

A Blue of Renewal

Blue moves its way across Amber Jensen’s textile work in the form of stitches, woven patches, and dye. Hand embroidered x’s, in groupings of blue hues, traverse the woolen, collaged terrains. A spectrum of shades implies light and depth. In her compositions, the artist offers us the barest suggestion of pattern and our attention is held, our minds stretching to name the song from a few bars of a long-forgotten melody.

Separate from her design practice, Jensen consciously protects her fine art practice. It is a location safeguarded from rules and obligations, shielded from the constraints of earning a livelihood, harbored even from the fear of committing error. It is a space away. Inside of this walled-off paradise, the artist can conduct her collage-like symphony of yarny stitches and dye puddles with abandon. She is free to wander where she is called: from tone to tone, stitch to stitch. It is exactly this many-layered marshland, or more specifically the deliberate act of building it, where the artist meets the spiritual. Entering the cloth with yet another stitch, then exiting to examine the mark, Jensen submerges and emerges, each time renewed.

“I envision myself high up above, hovering in the sky. I gently drop my arm down to softly create a new stitch, orchestrating each as one long continuous thread. I pour pools of blue dye, dripping around the edges, allowing the wool to sop it up in concentrated areas. I am like the moon, pulling and pushing the tides, rhythmic and pliant.”

“I envision myself high up above, hovering in the sky. I gently drop my arm down to softly create a new stitch, orchestrating each as one long continuous thread."

On a floor loom Jensen weaves the ground cloth onto which her embroideries are built, ‘like an artist making her own paper.’ Her hands and shuttle dive through the shed of the warp. Her woven cloth acts like a blank canvas. The structure of weaving, explains the artist, is rather anonymous, and tied to the grid. It does not possess an innate individuality. In going back into the woven cloth however, with embroidery and dye, the artist finds her own hand. Weaving is akin to our common anatomy, the unanimous architecture of our organs and bones. But it is the specificity of how our DNA is expressed which cannot be duplicated – where we individuate.

For this reason, the artist is compelled to graduate her woven substrates into singular works of art. But the prolonged process, its slowness, the permission to respond unhurriedly to the nuances of the ensuing terrain is where this artist finds connection, and ultimately: self.

The evolution of these blue terrains also offers the possibility of rebirth, and perhaps even redemption. As the process unfurls, missteps are made. Jensen responds by adding dye, adding more stitches. Missteps become essential, an informed progression towards something deeper. The chains of x’s parade across, connected at the back. Jensen describes them as ‘holding hands.’ They seem to wade through the blueness, awash in possibility.

Jensen cites the song “There’s a Blue Light,” by Crooked Fingers:

And I softly sing this song to myself… “come to the shore, everyone’s waiting, to be made pure, to be redone. Come to the shore and jump right into the blue water where we can sleep and soon begin again.”

Blue for this artist is the regenerative space of renewal, inside of the protected realm of her practice. It offers the ultimate freedom: the freedom to be in whatever way called, safe in the knowledge that blueness affords the opportunity to be redone.

And I softly sing this song to myself… “come to the shore, everyone’s waiting, to be made pure, to be redone. Come to the shore and jump right into the blue water where we can sleep and soon begin again.”

After living in the forest within the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina for nearly a decade, Amber returned to her childhood homeland in the Midwest. She is currently working out of a small, light-filled studio in South Minneapolis, MN. Woven, stitched or drawn, all her works capture elements of her home – the magical colors, flora and fauna, rivers and lakes, and the friends and family that she surrounds herself with.

Jensen’s education led from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to the Eugene Textile Center and the John C. Campbell Folk School. She has committed to sharing her skill by joining the weaving department at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, MN beginning in February 2022. She’s created works for the Walker Art Center and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Her works have been shown all over the globe. Last year she began exhibiting her textile artworks in galleries including Blue Spiral in Asheville, NC. She has won several awards for her innovative product design, most recently North Carolina’s “Our State Magazine Style Award”. She has been a visiting artist at Penland School of Craft several times.

To learn more about the work of Amber Jensen visit ambermjensen.com / @amberm.jensen