JOURNAL

Bianca Kuttickattu, Designer, wears the Colorant Serres Shirt and Lolani pants in Indigo at her cottage in Mountaindale, NY.

Indian Almond Leaf (Terminalia catappa) aka Catappa Leaf, is a tropical tree known for large, glossy leaves native to the Indian subcontinent. Part of a vast eco-system, fallen Catappa leaves provide a source of food, regulate water Ph, and even act as an anti-fungal for aquatic life. The leaves are heavy in tannins, natural compounds that can be extracted and have been used to create natural dyes that yield warm earthy tones to deep shades of brown and black.

What is the origin story of Namai and how does zero waste factor into your production? All of our repurposed Kantha textile pieces are zero waste. With the scraps from the adults jackets we make kids jackets, tote bags, and small pouches. The fabrics are precious and we make sure nothing is wasted.

What inspires you and how does it influence your design process? I’m inspired by art, interiors, travel, and nature. These don’t filter into my designs in a direct way, but they keep me feeling creative in different ways. Being in nature helps me unwind, so that stress and fatigue doesn’t cause burnout and hamper my creativity. Going to art exhibitions is something I need to do regularly, to absorb colors and compositions, and textures. I think the choices I make in colors and textiles unconsciously reflect my taste in art and culture, and sometimes I can trace it backwards after the product is finished, for example, I’m always drawn to vintage quilts with spots on them, because they remind me of Yayoi Kusama, and I’m always inspired by the colors and textures of Sam Gilliam, Rothko, Matisse, and Helen Frankenthaler, to name a few.

Where do you like to visit and travel to in the future? My favorite places to visit are places I have never been to before! I’m always drawn to places that have a strong art and craft culture, because it’s inspiring to learn and discover new things. Having said that, I adore Italy, it’s my favorite vacation place (that I’ve been to so far!) and traveling to India is always deeply inspiring and creative, I am trailing to India in a week to meet with artisans, and I can’t wait!

Who wears Namai and do you have any current muses? The people that wear Namai want to express who they are on the inside, and they aren’t afraid of standing out. They share a love of rare textiles and value individuality, creativity and unique expression. I’m constantly inspired when I meet people at markets and in person events, that choose a piece that represents who they are, it’s why I love what I do. My muse is a free spirited, color loving creative soul who is in harmony with who they are, and lives life on their own terms.

https://namai-studio.com/
@namai_studio

Tell us a bit about your childhood and how it influences your work today.
I grew up in Los Angeles, California.  Like most kids in LA, I spent a lot of time in a car; tent and car camping in the desert and in the front seat in traffic on the many LA freeways. Unlike most kids, my dad was an artist, and my mom, a bookbinder, so I learned how to use my hands and build things at a young age. Helping build our house (read: helping demo the old house with a sledgehammer), helping my mom in the bindery, and learning to stick weld- my childhood led me to be curious, adventurous, and not afraid to get my hands dirty, but I also just spent a lot of time in the car observing.

I would stare out the car window studying the fast moving landscape, freeway overpasses, the LA river- fully molded in concrete, or the eerie Mordor-esque fiery petroleum refineries in Long Beach. My work is deeply influenced by this fast moving view of the landscape and the marks that we as humans have made on the surface of the earth. I am often working on translating these marks or remnants of human industriousness into household objects; translating petroleum tanks into lighting fixtures, or crushed scrap metal into side tables. In grad school, I became infatuated with the endless acres of car pick apart yards outside of Detroit, Michigan- I think they reminded me of the 12 lane traffic jams of my youth. The infrastructure and power lines that lead to heavy manufacturing in Gary, Indiana also mirrored the Long Beach refineries.
My childhood taught me to keep looking out the window and to swing a sledgehammer with careless abandon.

How do you source materials and what are the preferred materials you use?
All of my designs come from material experimentation. It usually takes the form of an encounter with a found material. Sometimes only the idea and original prototype is made from the found material, and other times the design is always made with recycled materials. I’m a bit of a material magpie- always looking and collecting pieces or images of materials that inspire, ignite, or simply speak to me.

Because I work with found materials I spend a lot of time in scrap yards, pick apart yards, dumpsters, and on construction sites. I go hunting in recycling yards all over the country for interesting sheet metal that I can make the pieces from. I’m often looking for pieces that already have character to them, be it the specific pressed texture of a washing machine,  interesting hole patterns from metal shelving, pressed and formed texture from car parts, or a really good color. I’m always on the look out for a specific bright orange red color.

I treat my little Subaru Impreza like a pick-up truck, rolling huge logs into the back, stacking tailgates and bails of found materials. I always have ratchet straps on hand and have built my own roof rack from wooden dowels and pool noodles in case I have to pick up something larger than can fit in the back of my ‘truck’.

Describe a specific project/ piece that you hold dear from origin to completion.
While in grad school outside of Detroit, Michigan, I saw a big pile of rusty, bent in half, cnc railings leaning against a dumpster waiting to be scrapped. The pieces had very rough, chewed up edges covered with metal slag and rust. They were all bent in a rough upside down ‘U-shape’ and leaned up against the dumpster. In the process of being stacked, some of the pieces had fallen over sideways creating a ‘greater than’ > shape. In my mind immediately- It was a chair! I saw the upside down u shape as the back and the ‘greater than’ > shape as the seat the pieces would alternate and create a chair.

After getting permission (a step I have found to be important sometimes),  I saved the metal from the dumpster and jumped on and pried the material with a vice until I had two distinct curves that made up the back and seat respectively. I left the carved out edges of the material, while softening the sharp edges so it could be comfortable and not dangerous. It became the original Bent prototype.

In order to make the piece reproducible, because I have yet to come across the same material in my explorations- I took a paper pattern of the original chair curves and built two jigs to match the specific curves of the back and seat. Now, when I make new Bent chairs I take new 2” steel bar material, heat it up in my metal ‘through forge’- basically a round tube open on both sides with very hot flames shooting down from propane burners-  and bend them around the homemade jigs. The back and seat pieces are then stacked and very carefully tig welded from underneath so the welds are invisible. The piece becomes a conversation about line. The chair that appeared in the pile of trash has now become a reproducible design object.

Who has been most influential to you professionally?
I have always admired the work and studio practice of contemporary designer, Max Lamb. I think we are both inherently ‘scrappy’ using whatever tools and resources around us to inspire and create. I remember learning that he started his Nanocrystalline Copper Furniture series in his apartment kitchen sink, and watched videos of him casting pewter side tables on the beach with a stick and hot plate. I identify closely with that scrappy ingenuity.  Both of our studio practices have an element of performance. I love his ability to jump between very different materials and techniques, never being bound by what people think he makes. It’s a lesson that I try to hold very close to my heart.  You have to let the work and material lead you, instead of trying to chase what you think people want to buy. I think a lot of designers pigeon hole themselves to a specific material or technique and lose the love of making and experimentation. For both of us, experimentation with a specific material leads the design process.

More directly, my dear friend, mentor, and one-time boss, Vivian Beer taught me how to actually work professionally as an artist. Seeing and working with someone who is running their own small design studio is the best education you can ever have. She was first my teacher for a two month long metal furniture class at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and immediately afterwards called me up and hired me as her assistant in New Hampshire. I’ve worked with and alongside her for more than ten years. We’ve built concrete and metal furniture, large scale public artwork that wraps around buildings and spent months in the desert in an RV together. She is also incredibly scrappy (a favorite trait of mine) and has shown me how driven you have to be to make it in the design world. She is always re-creating and re-inventing her studio and practice and pushing herself to take on bigger, more complex and ambitious projects. She is one of those people who you can always count on, and who inspires you to be better at what you do.

www.hannahvaughan.com

@hannahvaughanstudio

Megan Offner (R), Ashira Israel (L) and Lindsay Black (C) of New York Heartwoods, wear the Colorant Reversible Denim Jacket,  High Waisted Denim pants and Fantasma Top in their workshop HQ in Accord, NY.

North American Black Walnuts (juglans nigra) have been used for centuries as a natural dye source. The leaves, bark and fruit can be extracted and used to color cloth. Walnut bark was used heavily during the Civil War in dyeing uniforms. Traces of Walnut-dyed garments have been found in the Temple of Pompeii as well as Viking settlements due to their abundance. The concentrated extracts of the hulls of the fruit served as our first writing inks. The heavy tannins make for a strong color source that conditions fibers during the dye process, acting as a softening agent while yielding yellow, orange and brown hues. 

Tanya Himeji Romero of Woodland Pantry, wears Colorant Corfu Dress in the Hudson Valley, NY.

Chaga mushroom (Inonotus obliquus) is a type of fungus that grows on the bark of Birch trees in colder climates. It has been used as an herbal medicine for centuries, often ground up and taken as a tincture, tea or capsule supplement to boost immunity and antioxidants. Its inner orange core produces a mycopigment (natural dyes originating from fungi and lichens) that creates vivid yellows, golds and oranges when extracted.

www.woodlandpantry.com

@woodlandpantry

 

Jean Brennan, Artist, Wears Colorant Hand Painted Jumpsuit in silk charmeuse, brush painted with crushed Cochineal & Fustic natural dyes.

Orsallia, a natural red purple dye, is an extraction from the lichen Umbilicaria which was worn by nobility in Roman times to display wealth, power and status. Women were forbidden to take part in the creation of this dye and ordinary citizens were forbidden to wear it. Ancient recipes include ocean water and urine in the dye process and it was often used in place of the Murex mollusk, a sea shellfish, a source of a similar royal hue but not as easily collected.

Blue.

Describe a typical day of your studio practice.
My day to day varies, from teaching to writing grants to messing around in the studio. Projects often begin with walks and writing, coupled with research about a plant or a place. In my response to site, I’m often weaving in scientific research, historical references, pop culture. Sometimes the relationships with scientists or collaborators, human or non-human, become central to the work. 

Who are you currently inspired by? An eclectic group of women: Amy Franceschini from Future Farmers, Agnes Denes, Helen Mirra, Donna Haraway, Joan Jonas, Rebecca Horn.

While visiting Michigan one summer, I was struck by the endless miles of reforestation, a mesmerizing repetition of red pines flying past the car window. Eventually, I found a location maintained by the University of Michigan Biostation, with little undergrowth save a patchy carpet of spring ferns. I staged a few photos and the seed for 'Performing vowels in the note of blue' was planted. That Fall, I located a similar site in my home state of New York.

'Performing vowels' is a score of non discursive communication filmed with(in) a grove of red pines in the Catskills. Planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps during FDR's New Deal, this century-old stand possesses the uncanny quality of a single species plantation gone wild. Standing among the trees, five women (a,e,i,o,u) perform the vowels through the use of semaphore flags- a signaling system that augments the body to communicate over the distances of land and sea. The movements, like language and the forest, slip between structure and improvisation. In this 8 minute video, looped in a gallery setting, I imagine a form of communication in which the forest plays a role in how we transmit ideas—a ritual of call and response whereby the patterns of movement and non-verbal sound form the phrases of language.

The original action was inspired by research on how trees 'talk' and asks if there are example of human communication that come closer to the way non-humans, such as plants and animals, communicate. That's how I arrived at the idea of using semaphore flags. But in the making of Performing Vowels, all kinds of other meaning began to unfold. For instance, vowels are the breath of language- in a sense they are atmospheric. Vowels are a speech sound that is made with no obstruction of the vocal tract, frictionless and continuant, they are open-throated. The color blue corresponds to the throat chakra and to truth. In Judaism, vowels are associated with god; in Japan, with the mother.

Click to view Performing vowels in the note of blue

Favorite trails to Hike?
Fishkill Ridge, east of Mount Beacon; Mohonk Preserve in the Catskills; and, Mt. Lafayette in the White Mountains.

Describe the process in how you conceived Intergalactic Naval Gazing?

It began with walking, plant identification, and dye research at the Haystack Artist Residency on Deer Isle, Maine (May 2018). Later that summer, on a hike in the Catskills I came across a large rocky outcrop covered with the Umbilicate mammulata lichen, known as rock tripe. In Latin, umbilicate refers to the naval, while mammulata, means small breast. I was drawn to the bodily references, as well as the deep purple dye it yields, called orsallia. A storm had detached and blown lichen bits all over the ground so I was able to gather a good amount. I chopped these up into smaller pieces and placed them in mason jars. The jars, marked either Y.O.U. (your own urine) or A.M. (ammonia method), sat in a window by my dresser. Each morning and evening, I gave the jars a hearty shake - for 4 months. 

All lichen are symbiosis of algae and fungi, an unexpected marriage of producer and de-composer. Using my own bodily fluids, and cohabiting with these jars as they transformed, was a way to enter into this synergy. The dye was ultimately displayed in flame-work glass vessels fabricated by Dan Spitzer from Malfatti Glass according to sketches I made while looking at medical renditions of internal organs. I wrote the essay, Intergalactic Naval Gazing, as an ode to the lichen I foraged.