Artist in Residence - Handbent Banana Arts and Health Centre
Hello again,
I have had some time to reflect on my recent Artist in Residency at Handbent Banana Arts and Health Centre, Tallebudgera Valley. Over 5 weeks starting in October I had a studio in the Handbent art shed located in the hills of Tallebudgera Valley, Gold Coast Hinterlands on 20 acres. The property is on Kombumerri country with a beautiful waterfall fed from spring water.
I was incredibly lucky that this residency also came with a stipend for materials, I was funded $1000 to spend and I decided that I wanted to work with some really beautiful fabrics that I have had my eye on for quite some time. In the beginning I thought I would dedicate all of my dyeing to perfecting Irit Dulman’s technique but as the weeks went on I diverted from this and new exciting things emerged (more on this in a minute). I purchased some really wonderful hemp, handspun handwoven linen, a linen silk blend, handspun khadi cotton and plenty of beautiful tannins from one of my new favourite fabric suppliers DAHAD - https://dahad.com.au/
The Hand Bent Banana Arts and Health Centre's artist in residence program is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
The first 2 weeks I spent focusing on practicing Irit’s method using her combination mordants and layering of tannin blankets. I wanted to be very specific about using different parts of the property in intentional ways - the first image above used only Australian natives within a 100m radius of the art studio, then I collected leaves from the edible garden as well as from different paddocks at different sea height levels on the property -I wanted to create a map of the property by utilizing the plants from each ‘region’. I found this a really interesting way to look at my surrounds on a deeper level thinking about how different species printed depending where they were on the land.
After all these beautiful results my mind began to wonder a little bit further from the path I was on, I had quite a bit of fabric scoured and ready to go. I got thinking about an experiment I had been wanting to try for a while. My partner grew up around Mt Tamborine and had spoken about his school years how he was forever having to buy new socks because the iron rich dirt would stain the socks pink and no matter how hard he tried it would never wash out. Knowing that iron is a mordant and having been in love with Bogolan cloth (mud cloth from Mali) I wanted to try out some experiments. Lucky for me there was plenty of rich red dirt and a stagnant dam on the property. Swipe through the gallery to see my results!
I started off by soaking the silks in the dam water while I gathered some mud, iron dirt and some other pigments from nearby and then had a play by scrunching it all through the fibre - I was also inspired by an artist I met recently named Debbie Taylor Worley who talked about laying calico on the ground and pouring dyes over her material to let the dye pool in the grounds crevices to imprint country to her cloth, I thought this was such a wonderful idea that I laid a wet piece of silk over a rock amongst a root cave and poured some slurry over it to capture the natural flow of the grounds topography.
I then carried the silks back to the art studio to bundle with leaves gathered from around the dam and threw them in a dyepot with extra leaves and spring water from the waterfall. I felt like this was a really organic and special way to dye these silks creating a really endemic piece of cloth that speaks directly to country. I am looking forward to exploring this way of dyeing further.
After all that fun playing with mud I started looking at the textiles I already had mordanted and my mind wondered further. I spent the next 2 days shibori tying this 2m panel of handspun Indian khadi cotton.
I also remembered I had recently seen people in the Facebook dye groups testing the tannin content of banana skins. Being surrounded by a banana farm I got curious… I had noticed that once the banana blossom petals had fallen to the ground and dried up they still contained quite a bit of colour. I gathered a bunch along with some quandong and eucalyptus leaves from the paddock and threw them all in to a dyepot creating this really beautiful charcoal black.
With all the beautiful bushland around the property I also got to indulge in a little bit of basket weaving during my residency. Although I don’t get to weave as much as I’d like I really do love creating baskets! I would like to invest more time in the new year learning new skills and different ways to weave.
The first basket is a random weave from palm inflorescence I found while walking along the drive way on my first day. The second little basket started off well using spokes of cane offcuts that Karleen had in the art shed with handspun wool yarn and hemp twine - it was going well until it wasn’t and I abandoned it as a bowl stuffing it full of dirt and moss to live in the garden. The next basket is another random weave but this time following a tutorial by Foraged Fibre using rainforest vine cordage from a nearby banana tree and ginger plant. Lastly are 2 small piccabeen baskets molded from Bangalow palm sheaves - I learnt this technique recently from artist Libby Harward during the First Nations Artist Camp.
I feel extremely privelidged to have been given this opportunity and my energies are renewed to keep trying out different techniques. Thank you so much for reading this blog entry, if you’d like to connect and learn more about natural dyes my next workshop is on January 16th 2022 at Mt Tamborine running from 10am-4pm and tickets can be found by following this link: https://retritus.com/shop/p/botanicalprintworkshop
I aim to write another blog post next week about the First Nations Artist Camp I attended recently, see you then!
Norton
