Art from the Land

Inspired by place

Hello from a small off-grid finca in Andalusia, where I’m currently away on an artist residency! This week I’m taking readers along, with some glimpses of how I’m gathering materials and inspiration from the land.

It's winter of course and the poorest time of year for plant colours, but it's an opportunity to be challenged and think outside the box. Besides, I brought a couple of things with me...

First, behold the finca. It is covered in these dancing oaks, which from a distance I mistook for olive trees, so unfamiliar was their shape.

This time of year, all these oaks have carpeted the ground with acorns (to the complete delight of the beautiful pigs that are raised on the land in this area). I made straight for the acorn tops to see what ink they would make.

As I mentioned, we are off-grid, and our light and water depend on sun and rain. As we can’t afford to waste either, I'm adapting all my colour extraction methods to use as little power and water as possible. Here, I added soda ash to the acorns and then poured boiling water over them, covered and left them to soak several hours. As you can see above, that alone started extracting some colour. Then every few hours, I brought them to the boil and turned the heat off, to let them soak again. To reduce, I did this without covering. For a small pot, it only takes 3-4 repeats to get a good strong result.

I only used a few acorn tops for my first batch, but got this good preview of the ink out of them, a lovely golden brown.

The least pleasant aspect of this stay, as far as I’m concerned, is that the only source of heat is this woodburner stove I have to worry about constantly.

Aside from having to collect kindling, I have to take out the ashes daily. Looking at them this morning I couldn't help myself... I kept a handful of ashes which I ground finely.

Adding some dissolved gum arabic produced a paint as usable as any. We'll see how this looks shortly.

One of the first things I found, when stepping out the first morning, was this trace of the presence of wild boars, who come rooting all over the estate.

Since they had obligingly uncovered this soil for me, I had to gather a bit and wash it. I did the same with a bit of earth that the rains had washed out onto the patio, and by day 3 I had 3 local pigments on the palette, in addition to the ink:

Nevertheless, I brought materials with me as well, particularly some I wanted to work more with that require space or make a mess, by which I mean indigo.

The lack of adequate space to work with indigo dye back home has been forcing me to find ways to make the use of it more and more portable, by preparing small vats (here a single liter) to dye paper. Using what I had at hand, I managed to get a few things beautifully dyed.

I'm particularly proud of the below. I had two long concertinas left over from the Book of Ruination, that I brought along in case I had an idea. And I decided to dye one of them fully, which I did using the small tub in the foreground. I couldn't document it because I had to it down in the dye in small sections, a couple of minutes each, then sliding along to the next. Then rinse it under the tap, then repeat! And well-worth it it was, even if I don't have a project for it yet.

The indigo squares will become mini-artworks, once I work out what to do exactly, but probably finished with a design cut out in white paper.  The unfolded sketchbook is my one from Granada last year, which I brought back for inspiration.

Walking through the dancer-like trees, a line penned by a countryman of mine came back to mind, and resulted in the following artist book, written with the soil they grow on (and spattered with indigo):

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
that we may record our emptiness.”

Gibran Khalil Gibran