Living
Ink
Alisha’s Workshop
June 24, 2021
Bela Farm, Hillsburgh, ON
For our final home workshop, Alisha invited us to Bela Farm to explore colour in nature, in the particular season of early summer. The objective, to make natural inks from foraged local plants, promised the kind of creativity and connection we’d all been craving.
We opened by sharing the colours we’re most drawn to: spring greens, teal, forget-me-not blue, berry purples, pastels… For each of us, these hues were more than just personal preference—they also held emotions, memories, and medicine. Then, with ink-making expert Sammy Tangir, we walked the land, collecting goldenrod, buckthorn, willow, vetch, and other plants for summery inks. We also gathered materials such as pine needle branches to use as brushes.
We paused for a delicious, colourful lunch from the Tin Roof Café along with a salad containing wild, edible flowers and leaves we’d collected on our walk, while the contents of our baskets simmered and steeped in pots over a fire. We stripped the outer bark of the willow to use in an analgesic tincture, and put the pieces of the inner bark in mint tins which went inside the fire, transforming into charcoal.
Reading aloud from Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property, we explored the many colours of sadness, an ironically soothing experience. Following dessert and a colour alchemy lesson with Sammy, we experimented with making different inks, then wrote and drew with the plants that live where we live. Some of us collaborated on a silk shawl for our Persephone puppet (adding stamps of cherry left over from dessert).
After eighteen months of chasing sterility, we delighted in the release of ink-spotted hands.
As we wrapped up the day, we came full circle: our very first home workshop, Sasha’s “Life of a Dead Tree,” centred on an ash tree plagued by emerald ash borer. And in our final home workshop, we made a black ink from the ashes of another dying ash tree to create the art that would reflect how far we’d come together. This “fire dust,” as Sammy called it, was a natural medium that could give the ash tree a voice to speak beyond death and blend with ours in collaboration. As our living inks dried, meeting paper and air, they continued to change color—to evolve with the changing environment as we do.
Alisha asked us to read excerpts from Bluets by Maggie Nelson, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking by Jason Logan. We also watched NYT Live Drawing with Jason Logan and saw Logan depict a variety of emotions with his living inks.
What hues are in the stories we tell, and do they vary by season?
What would it look like to think of our tools, and the works we create with them, as alive or impermanent or seasonal?
What does it mean to create in collaboration with nature?
What if we thought of colour as emotion? As medicine?
"Ink is primarily a tool of communication, a way of recording and remembering. It’s a way to bridge the gap: of distance and also of time... We record the past now, in the present, to squirrel it away for the future, just as surely as we put up cans and jars to feed on when the scarcity of winter comes." –Sasha
“When the earth starts blossoming with fragrant flowers of springtime, flowers of every sort, then it is that you must come up from the misty realms of darkness…”
Hymn to Demeter, lines 401-402