JOURNAL

Laura Sansone of New York Textile Lab, wears the Colorant Ellis Shirt in Mallorca and Bronwyn Dress in Guava at her home and dye garden in Putnam Valley, NY.

Marigold (Tagetes) has a long and rich history as a natural dye, valued for its vibrant gold-yellow to orange hues. Indigenous to Central and South America, marigold flowers were cultivated by the Aztecs, who used the plant not only for ornamental and medicinal purposes but also as a dye source. The bright pigments extracted from marigold petals, primarily caretenoids like lutein, were used to color textiles, particularly in ceremonial and festive garments.

Tell us about your childhood and how did it inspire your work in textiles? I grew up on Long Island in the 70's and 80's. My Dad was a collage artist. His work was very intricate, made up of tiny cut pieces of paper that he would layer or tiny gears and springs from watches and clocks that he would arrange into patterns. His artwork often resembled textiles through color and pattern. I would help him all the time, mainly sorting and organizing lots of collage materials at his drafting table. I think this taught me the patience required to engage in detailed, process oriented handcrafting work. I was heavily influenced by my Dad.
 
Who has been an inspiration for you? I recently pulled out from storage, a hand crocheted blanket that my Grandma made for me in the 1970's. She made it with wool and acrylic yarn scraps. She has always been a big inspiration for me. She was a professional seamstress and she made me clothes and taught me how to sew and crochet at a very young age. I loved looking through her sewing table and all her supplies. One Christmas, my parents bought me a used Singer sewing machine. I was quite small, and it felt like a real grown up gift. The present that year from my Grandma was a sewing basket with lots of supplies in it. She helped me make some pillows for my dolls that winter. I still think about her when I work in my studio. She really influenced me.
 
What are the benefits of using climate beneficial wool and how does it tie into regenerative farming? Climate Beneficial™ is a regenerative farming verification that was founded by the nonprofit organization Fibershed in Northern CA. Climate Beneficial™ is a holistic land management program, a verification and a label for the industry. This verification connects brands directly to farms and ranches creating transparency, traceability and trust along their value chain. The climate beneficial program enables brands to internalize the cost of extracting from the land by supporting carbon farming practices, which are protocols that store carbon back in the soil and plant matter. Carbon farm practices are specific to each individual farm and include things like rotational grazing, cover cropping, not till farming, and composting, to name a few. The Climate Beneficial™ Verification is a program modeled from Earth's carbon cycle, which is the most basic, natural system of circularity and reciprocity.
 
What materials do you like to work with and how do you choose them? I only work with natural materials. I also choose to work with materials that are a part of the Climate Beneficial™ program. Mainly these yarns and textiles are wool, cotton and alpaca blends. Here in NYS, I am a founding member of the Carbon Farm Network cooperative, a group of small brands who work together to make yarn from fibers that are sourced in NYS and grown using Carbon Farming protocols. The membership fees of our cooperative drive funds back into Carbon Farming on our partnering farms.
 
Do you teach others about sustainable practices in textiles? What's that experience like? I teach a course at Parsons School of Design called Community Supported Textiles. This course addresses bioregional textile production through the use of locally sourced yarns, textiles and natural dyes. My teaching also focuses on building new models for our clothing and textile production systems by shifting from linear, extractive growth models to circular models that are more closely aligned with natural systems. In addition to teaching at Parsons, I consult with designers and teach workshops. It's important for me to share knowledge and raise awareness about the problems that plague our clothing and textile systems. I hope that humans will shift our production and consumption habits away from models that support extraction and exploitation and toward models that foster a collective stewardship for the land, animals and people in our clothing and textile systems. This can only happen when we change our relationship to what we value and internalize the costs of what we make and consume.
 
Where have you traveled and how has it influenced your textiles research? I've traveled to the Republic of Georgia, Haiti, and Milan to work on textile related projects. The most influential trip for me was Norway though, where I traveled from Bergen up north to the Lofoten Islands to experience their regional fiber and textiles. I got to visit several mills, and manufacturers and learned about the wool tradition there. I also learned about the country's heritage sheep that date back to the age of the Viking people. This experience really influenced me and deepened my desire to build bioregional textile systems here in NYS.
 
Do you have any future projects you are excited about? I'm excited about growing our Carbon Farm Network, a cooperative and distributed economic model that brings climate beneficial fiber to market. Our cooperative is a slow growth business model, where designers who make more yarn pay more into the membership fee, which goes back into the land conservation on our partnering farms. The more you take from the land, the more you need to give back (reciprocate). Typically, clothing and textile businesses are structured in a way where they are encouraged to make more, so the price point will come down (efficiencies of scale). This leads to "growthism" and over extraction and over consumption. I love working cooperatively and making decisions together with other designers while together, supporting our wool and alpaca growers.

www.newyorktextilelab.com
@nytextilelab

Kimmy Quillin, Artist, wears the Colorant Unison Jacket, 6-plant Space Knit pants and Colorant Mezzo Crew in Cacao in her studio in Brooklyn, NY.

Indonesian sappanwood (Caesalpinia sappan) is a tropical tree native to Southeast Asia. It is highly valued for its vibrant red dye, which produces a deep red color that has been used for centuries for textile dyeing, batik printing, and traditional medicine. The process of extracting this dye is a meticulous and time-consuming endeavor. It begins by harvesting mature sappanwood trees and cutting them into small pieces. The pieces are boiled in water to release the dye compounds present in the heartwood. The resulting liquid is strained and concentrated to obtain a rich, red colorant that can be shifted to pinks, oranges and browns depending on what mordant is used.

What are your current motivators and inspiration?
Inspiration is my favorite mood enhancer. Right now I am visiting and revisiting the Ruth Asawa drawings exhibit “Through Line” at the Whitney, as well as Judy Chicago’s “Herstory” at the New Museum. Both of these women worked their tails off throughout their entire lives and created an astonishing amount over many decades. Ruth Asawa is the queen of making the most out of the materials around her. If someone gave her a bouquet of flowers, she meticulously drew them into an exquisite work of art. Through her lines, you can tell the exact weight of a flower head hanging off a spindly stem over the edge of a bouquet. Her drawings are full of all the patience in the universe. And I could watch Judy Chicago’s Atmospheres films for days. Between 1968-1974 she set up technicolored smoke shows in the desert with nude women painted monochrome head to toe. The simple premise of them walking forward or interacting with colored smoking flares in that hot place is so simple but so powerful. Every time I see one it’s like, “Damn, YEAH.”
I am also constantly reading (mostly non-fiction, lots of biographies, sometimes exhibition catalogs) and bringing themes from that learning into my work. I currently have from the library the catalog from Hilma af Klint’s show at the Guggenheim “Paintings for the Future.” Judy Chicago’s autobiography is on deck, and Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art is also in the queue. I also love anything by N.K. Jemisin.

How did your interest in natural dye come about and how have you incorporated it into your work?
I started paying attention to several artists who work with natural pigments around 2020 including Cara Marie Piazza, Amanda Morales, Wild Pigment Project, and the wealth of info distributed by Seattle-based dye company Botanical Colors. In one of her recent newsletters, natural pigment artist and activist Tilke Elkins asked what might change if more artists worked with natural pigments, how the messages they were inspired to send with their work might change and how the art world as a whole might change. She writes, “As a paint maker, I think a lot about the ways in which people currently use (synthetic) paints, and how their practices would change if they moved to waste-stream-sourced paints instead. How much of what they do now would they be able to do using remediated paint materials? How much would they not be able to do, and how would that change the messages they communicate?” In this phase, I find myself drawn to organic shapes in general and have been particularly drawn to the curves and fold of leaves, pine cones and the human body. 
Since June I have been working mostly with reclaimed/foraged dye materials: avocado, black bean and acorn. I use them to dye canvas which has been cut into premeditated shapes. I assemble these into a desired image by hand stitching them back together. Finally, I stretch it as I would a regular canvas. The result is a pseudo-quilted/appliqued canvas in varying dye shades with its seams and handmade-ness exposed. The depth and variation created by the dye are beautiful beyond what I could create by my hand alone.

What are some projects or upcoming bodies of work you are excited about?   In addition to my own art practice, I am excited about writing and talking about the work of others. I had an inspiring conversation recently with artist Colleen Herman and Olympia gallery owner Ali Rossi while sitting on the gallery floor talking through Colleen’s current show. We discussed the concept for the show’s site-specific presentation, which works came slowly or quickly, the dialogue between different pieces, and stretching artistic boundaries. It inspired me to write an essay about it the next day which you can read on my website. Since then I have been planning to turn this into either a written or audio series where artists talk through their current show. It is a strange, significant moment when your most recent body of work is out of your studio and presented to the public, but you aren’t in the room with it every day. This poignant point of release and all the backstory that lead to it are what I want to be in dialogue about.

www.kimmyquillin.com
@kimmyquillin

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. 

Liz Spencer, The Dogwood Dyer, prepares an indigo vat in her studio in Brooklyn, NY.

Indigo has been harvested for thousands of years for its rare and natural blue. The leaves of the plant are first fermented then boiled to a reduction that creates a “white bath”. When material is submerged then lifted in the air, it first appears to be a bright yellow then magically turns blue as it oxidizes. Unlike other dyes in which color intensity can be somewhat controlled by soaking time, Indigo differs in that it must be re-dipped repeatedly to achieve deep tones.

What is your favorite color?
This is a tough one…considering that my work demands an appreciation for and understanding of many colors, but I love the aqua blue that results from fresh leaf indigo dyeing on silk. It’s like a Carribean light teal blue or a southwest turquoise stone. I’ve never been able to achieve this color with any other process or plant, so it’s very special!

Where did your love for natural dyeing begin?
I began by collaborating with a community garden called Cordwainers Garden in London at an allotment next to my Grad School (The London College of Fashion) in Hackney, East London. Space to garden, as in many urban areas, is little to be had there and as a result, very much cherished, so I was lucky to have ample space to explore the process of exclusively growing dye plants. As a natural dyer that actually grows my own plants for dyeing, I am able to see the process from seed to cloth and this holistic approach keeps my research hungry mind and creative spirit continually fulfilled. Gardening and harvesting is immensely gratifying, and distinctly different from dyeing with only imported powdered extracts. This full life cycle aspect of my introduction to natural dyes has generally keep me coming back to the practice.

What’s your favorite scent?
Jasmine, Magnolia, and Gardenia are all favorites of mine