Spring project round-up! Photos include: bark woven cover for wip triptych ‘book’, coracle-making, Otis’s custom kitchen table, English Ivy paper hanging to dry and springing mules ears.
Handwork is good for the heart and the mind ❤️
Made some gouache with my local collected/grown pigments. So many hours of labor are represented here! There’s one synthetic I found at the thrift at the end of the line.
Rainy day painting next!
I put together some sets of handmade local pigment for Future Finds: a fictional storefront selling artifacts of ecological remnants from the Bay Area, set in the year 2100!
You can visit the storefront thurs, fri, sat 12-6p @batherslibrary Also, there are some really cool talks and workshops happening as part of this project. Check it out on the bathers library page!
Each set includes four local hand-processed pigments with differing although sometimes overlapping relationships to humans and the broader ecology. Some sources fit into multiple categories; categorical boundaries are semi-porous.
California natives: stable long-term balanced presence in local ecosystems
Waste stream: pulled from the human waste system of 2025
Ruderal:* thriving in liminal deeply disturbed ecologies created through human activity; often scapegoats for colonial destruction; often early succession plants. *Ruderal Witchcraft Manifesto, Haughwout, 2025
Cultivated: Desired and tended by humans in the year 2025
Back left / Set 1 pigments left to right: Marigold (Lake Merritt, Oakland), Mugwort (Oakland hills), Brick (Diamond, Oakland), Woad (Fruitvale, Oakland)
Center front / Set 2 pigments left to right: Madder (Fruitvale, Oakland), Redwood cone (Diamond Park Oakland), Eggshell (Fruitvale, Oakland), Privet berry (Sausal Creek Oakland) Back right / Set 3 pigments left to right: Goldenrod flowers (Ivy Hill Oakland), Elderberry green (Sunol), Grapevine trimmings charcoal (Fruitvale, Oakland), Oxalis flower (North Oakland)
A few colors I processed this year: oxalis, scabiosa / pincushion flower, osage orange, ochres of many colors, indigo, blanket flower, rudbeckia, bone and wood charcoals.
Pigment processing and paint-making brings me so much joy! Working this way helps me feel situated, placed in my true context. There’s an ever expanding complexity in every piece of our world.
Gouache painting made with collected pigments - from plants, from minerals, from lost/saved time, from the thrift store.
Maybe from when I close my eyes and still see the sun.
Carousel book 📕 made @_up_stream residency.
Papers made from iris and cattail.
Paints/pigments - homegrown rose and madder + collected St. John’s wort and ochre.
Scenes of me, silly lil human, trying to figure out how to reach inside of and out beyond my cultural heritage that says the world is dead.
I know all of the world is alive. How do I experience it that way, not just create a thesis on it in my captured mind?
One week into @_up_stream residency. Working so hard to make my precious little things ✨
Handmade papers from horsetail, iris leaves and English Ivy.
Hoping to combine w handmade gouache in the rainy coming days.
Photo 1: I made this little collected pigment painting months ago remembering running around on deer trails as a kid. I remember feeling so satisfied about how we could share the same infrastructure. How we shared enough common goals and anatomy to both find the same paths useful.
Photo 2: Yes, ochre sticks into enamel! 🎉 last month studio experiment
Photo 3: Midwest rain by the marsh - water, water, water
Water whorl studies w collected natural pigments in gouache paint. I’ve been really into drawing water and waves lately. Pigments include elderberry, mugwort, marigold, woad, madder, eggshell, redwood cone and charcoal.
“I imagine their hearts become little birds.
I love them so much.”
-Bilal Shbeir
School teacher speaking of his martyred students, Gaza, Dec 2023
The small book is enameled copper / colorful glass fused to metal in a kiln.
The words are precious.
The small book is a precious object to hold. To honor the immeasurable grief. To pray? To move our bodies, hearts and energies toward liberation.
The life of each Palestinian is precious.
Made @hospitalityhousesf - a place that has fostered in me a FELT sense of the value of every life.
