research toward: creativity: toward regeneration

a research giveaway and zine share during a gathering at Eastern Edge in St Johns, Ktaqmkuk, on the last day of February 02024.

while i have been in residence at Eastern Edge, i’ve focused on research and methods and deeper learning of materials i work with on a day-to-day basis. from my long-term relationship with natural dyes and my even longer term relationship with painting i’ve focused on making lake pigments and watercolours. though i haven’t made new works while i’ve been here, i’ve expanded my understanding, knowledge, and relationship with dyestuffs that i’ve taken care of and worked with for over a decade. on February 29 i gave my research away in a presentation and zine. the zine contents are below.

what response comes to you when you hear the word research? what about the term creative research?

use the form below to let me know if you’d like to.

i want to share with you my lived experience. from my position, knowledges that are come-to through creative processes, reflection, and the making and doing with hands has been given relatively little importance or relevance when they are (unnecessarily) compared to eurowestern academic and/or scientific bodies of knowing. (i have come to know that this dismissal isn’t my reality.) my/the reality is, knowledge come to through the doing resists and stands in its own place in spite of and at the same time, as an alternative to, research that is validated by being linked to academic, economic, and scientific rationalization. coming to know outside of the frameworks of capitalism and colonialism shows us all how to imagine a world that (can) exist/s beyond those. i believe and experience that to share our knowing, and therein care, increases sovereignty, agency, and ability to get toward a visioned real-life, applied utopia.

for me, inside of my life and varied practices, research is relational — new-to-me knowledge is in no way, new. i do not exist without the world and my interwoven bonds. new-to-me knowledge comes to me through relationships that i am committed to, that i continually invest in. relationships with people, where i am, where i’ve been, maybe where i’m going; i arrive to new through my engagement and relation to land, place, more-than-human kin, water, stone, movement; i arrive to it through touch and thinking together with my kin. part of my relationship to knowledge is to share it in real-time, to practice givingaway; i believe that this practice shows a pathway to a world framed up with security, care, love, honesty, safe vulnerability, and a renewed and regenerated social fabric.

knowledge then, is for me, a series of steps that unfold in real time around me as i think and make and follow threads. i make and do and what to do next clarifies, i’m somehow guided. then, rest and reflection are necessary to see clearly and articulate. and then when it becomes cohesive, i’m moved to share.

generosity, the real kind, the kind that is in service, enters here. this teaching about generosity is connected to love and care and it necessarily cannot be theoretical. woven together with generosity are respect, reciprocation, and recognition.

i believe that all of our creative practices are always emergent and that they are illuminating. the process of making and knowing is an unfolding event that creatively and collectively brings-to-life regenerated humanity and a good future through social changes. art and creative research does this. art making and its process shows us the way. you do this. when creative work is shared, when it is gifted to the world, we move toward; creative work is ceremony.

in this way, with all of this in mind and heart, i want to share with You this little collection of research, notated in this zine, made at Eastern Edge Artist Run Centre in February 02024 during a residency.

all pigments made during my residency are made with the following recipe unless otherwise noted. i worked with tap water, because i practice working with the water that is part of the same place i am, and mainly with dye plants that i grew and harvested in my garden in Summer 02023. i supplemented my palette with indigo and cochineal from Earthues and some winter gathered alder cones. i purchase alum, calcium carbonate, and all dye house additives from Maiwa

left to right, top to bottom: safflower, hollyhock and indigo, cosmos sulphurous, hollyhock, indigo, buckthorn and indigo, cochineal, pH adjusted cochineal, indigo and cochineal, buckthorn

recipe:

1000 g water
10 g dyestuff
12 g potassium alum sulphate
6 g calcium carbonate

you will need:

- a pot
- a scale or measuring tools
- a large glass vessel (jar, vase, bowl)
- a bucket
- a strainer, mesh
- coffee filters, basket type
- a burner, stove, heat source

simplified process:

- make a dye bath with weighed amount of dyestuff and water. simmer for at least an hour but longer if you can. let cool, overnight is good if possible.
- strain the liquid and compost or discard the spent dyestuff. warm the liquid up again, just warm enough that you can’t hold your fingers in it.
- this is your dye bath that you will precipitate pigment from. at this stage, all of the pigment is in its water soluble state. pour this into your glass vessel making sure to leave lots of headspace.
- add all of the alum and stir to dissolve. when its dissolved, add a small amount of calcium carbonate — the mix will foam up!!
- stir, as it starts to deflate add more calcium carbonate. repeat this until you’ve added all of the calcium carbonate.
- you have now precipitate the pigment out of suspension of the dye bath! leave the vessel to settle for hours or overnight. the sludge at the bottom of the vessel is your pigment.
- carefully pour the liquid off the sludge while maintaining the foam on the top; this foam is full of pigment too. if you have a syringe, use this to draw the liquid off.
- pour fresh water on the sludge and swirl around; this is washing the pigment. allow to settle and repeat washing until the liquid is mostly clear.
- filter the now washed pigment through a coffee filter in mesh strainer and allow it to dry.
- your pigment is ready to use now in watercolour binder, oil, acrylic, or glaze medium.

safflower

safflower and indigo

cosmos sulfurens

cochineal

safflower and cochineal

wela’lin, huge thanks to Eastern Edge for hosting me, for supporting this research and giving help to make it available, for formatting and printing this zine.

this is how we can visit

This essay was published in Syphon 8.0, a publication of Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre in Kingston, territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg Nations. this is how we can visit is a body of work made of textiles, installation in place, photographs, and this essay. Click here to see all of the images and shorter writing.

photo credit Kristin Pope

And every day, as it dies and light leaks, I think of you. 

While I was there at the Icelandic Textile Centre, so far from our home but steeped in  familiarity and similarity, I finally responded to you. My call-back found its tender shape in a partner textile to one of yours. I speak back to your hand-woven work. I don’t know how or when you learned to weave, maybe from one of your parents. I don’t know your story, but I know that I learned a lot by spending time together, with you, that way. 

I found your weaving in your old home; each piece of the house and the textiles returning to the land – your home long gone. I found your hand-built loom there too, your initials carved deep in the grain. I found pieces, parts, and tools from your life that helped you make it, helped you make other lives, and which helped to make that house a home: your circular, hand crank knitting machine, jars of buttons, kitchen wares, photographs, glasses, a loom, a single, carefully hand-woven curtain. I thought then – a curtain is usually one piece of a pair, just as a person is one piece of a family collective. I looked around in the mould and the dust and the garbage – I unlocked old trunks and pulled open drawers stuck together with paint, opened up old closets and inspected water pipes – but I couldn’t find the other part. I haven’t always been able to find  you either. But here, in carefully making a new curtain, to pair together with yours and to be together through time, you reach me and I reach you.  

That gesture of weaving, such old movements, of light moving through cloth and space is  intergenerational making with a very, very long thread, a thread held softly between space. What you’ve left behind, intentional or not, weaves us together to us. What you’ve left, and what I’ve found, reminds me of who I’m from, it lets me talk to you without words, in untouchable and simultaneously tactile ways. To respond to you in this woven forward way lets me (re)imagine and maybe supply your love forward. I think that you left a fire that was unkindled for a little while. But you left tinder. 

- - - 

I have wondered this: 

What would it have been like if intergenerational love and caring were cultivated in my own family network?

What if my great-great-grandmothers' makings were carefully passed between our family  network and we had handmade things and maintained shared practices to know our kin and our place? 

What would it be like if the opportunity existed to have loved my blood kin fiercely in day-to-day life? 

How different everything might be. 

- - - 

These are questions I have, and the only way I can get near to answers is through making. But I haven't reached any resolution. And, I guess I don't really have to – I guess that I won’t. The  asking, making, and moving is enough for me. Embodying that love, care, and forward  passing; that fierce love is enough. 

I can’t help but think of my great-great-great grandparents, MJH and her parents, every day – I live across the road from where they lived, I walk past the old stone foundations of their home and buildings every day; I am part of this place and their makings just like them. I think about making and weaving like a time-stamp and a place-map. By making a response-based paired curtain to MJHs woven work, I’m working and weaving to make a circle complete again, or at least partially. Though I didn’t know MJH, she is someone that I come from and one to whom I owe my care and attention. 

Making, for me, in any capacity, is a thread wound through my evolving understanding of life. Making with my hands is a footer for experiencing the world and allows for continual, specific, and personal meaning-making and (re)construction. So, necessarily on the way, I must deconstruct and rearrange containers that feel safe but limit me as I make my way through; replacing restrictions caused by lost love with tender conversations and visiting, with soft making and strings, and sometimes with broad movements. Maybe instead of hard walls for containment, I'm working on something more of a membrane or soft tissue that wraps around and through life and practice. Like cloth. Like a shroud. A web through which all things pass, make their impact, leave parts of themselves and take parts of me while they're at it, all for better or worse. 

While I’m working, specifically with MJH, I notice my thinking-time to be of intergenerational knowledge, transmission and translation, care, and love – but also negative space, emptiness, and loss. I find myself thinking about putting life pieces together somehow, complete with ‘gaps-and-holes’, just like the way cloth is made. I’m not trying to fill gaps-and-holes, but trying to see them fully. A look toward specific cohesion. The gaps-and-holes in my family sometimes feel like gorges – like impossibilities. Working with my hands helps me understand that they’re not necessarily something to be solved, or even found. 

I have a deep respect for work made with hands. When I use my own hands to work and make work in the way that my ancestors have, toward makings for people and places I love, I’m moved beyond respect and into an embodied honour-state. Story and meaning carried in a bundle from person to person (in)directly in place must be an act of love: love for those  ancestors, for those future relations, and relations who won’t ever be known; love for place in  the world. This action reaches around time-place to action the words "I love you”. This making says “I haven’t forgotten, I won’t”. To make is to materialize potentialities and to touch time. To make, is to architect toward – to imagine and contribute to laneways for unconditional love for us (t)here, just as we are, in a softly revived world. 

What we make and then leave behind (for a time anyway) is, in the same breath, how we reach around us and ahead of us, how we stretch behind and above and beside. It’s a deep time entanglement: a plying-together; a coming-to from the before, over and over again. 

This textile-talk with MJH feels like somewhat of a beginning but is truthfully, a very small  filament in a very large web. That’s the point of intergenerational knowledge, care, and love  transmission after all – to engage, to generate more of it, in all directions, in all ways, always. I’m not having children, so I know that this making won’t be transferred directly in that way. But long-view, long lasting yet ephemeral makings have a way of gentle impact beyond the life-span of a/my body. I hope my relations have and make life and works that continue reflecting us back and forth and toward.

I think that I’m holding your hand MJH, and I’m looking forward.

Not a Homestead

A little while ago, I had the honour of publishing a little writing about land-life, about tending to place and home in BESIDE 13. Here’s an edited excerpt from the piece.

photo by Megan Samms

My home is Here. Up a valley with braided rivers shored with boreal forest is the place of my family, kin, community, and the land I belong to, have always belonged to. I couldn’t leave Here again.

Here, we tend to gardens, animals who have names, honeybees, food, medicinal and dye plants. Here, pick by pick, I weave cloth that is both a reflection of this place and is made of this place. Here, I am in a long conversation with my ancestors, myself developing into an ancestor, and a good one I hope. I work much the way they work(ed), I make the way they make (made), and I live much the way they live(d), and I do so as part of a continuum, developing, adopting, and adapting as time moves all around us. 

I think some call us homesteaders. When someone asks, “Are you homesteading?”, I feel a pressure rising in me, something that feels like resistance and rejection. Maybe my distaste for the word “homesteader” comes from the inherent implication that this place wasn’t always my home, that I have to labour to make it so. 

Here, is the place where I take care of home and home takes care of me.

Place dried fir needles in a glass vessel. It’s okay to crush them a little with your hands. Pour enough sunflower oil over the needles to cover them; stir a little with a slender fir stick to release any air bubbles.

Now, place the vessel in a cool, dark place in your home. Leave for one month, but check on it now and then, smell it, notice the change in colour of the oil.

After the month, decant into a smaller bottle or jar.

Put the spent fir needles in the compost.

Use the fir-infused, green-tinged oil in your bath, in your hair, or on your skin.

Though the word “homestead” has roots and usage in many languages, the term became popularized as an idea and a practice by colonial settlers in the U.S. According to the American Homestead Act of 1862, a homestead is an area of public land in the West (usually 160 acres) granted to any U.S. citizen willing to settle on and farm land for at least five years. 

There are so many complex layers to this, and as much as they concern me, they’re not what I want to write to you about. There is so much more that preoccupies and directs me. I want to write to you about self-determined hard work, hope, creativity, and the reasons I mainly position myself and action from within my community, along the sides of my kin.

I hear from her that our worlds—ancestral, present, sky worlds—need our input, our energy, and our good work; we need to work, constantly and hard, to create the web we want and need. We need each other, we need the land, and the land needs us too. 

In the Fall of the year, go to the beach. Every evening. 

The seawater is almost at its warmest now, get in.

Watch the beach for kelp landing. Here, it washes up in the tonnes.

When this happens, bring a little home every night; mulch your garden beds with it, especially where you’ve grown the tomatoes, garlic, carrots, and potatoes. 

Be like our neighbour Gus, and drop some off to people you believe in.

I’m interested in world building, in pressing reset on work and ideas of work that architected systems I didn’t consent to. Rebuilding worlds takes a lot of hope, love, communication, hard work, observation, repetition, and slowness. 

With the way things are going, I/we have to work so hard to build up a world(s) that our ancestors might recognize, one that shows up in some reflected place, one that they might be proud of. I’m not afraid to operate outside of capitalist models of making products and doing business; they’re not my models, after all.

I think that people are constantly constellating and bodies are interdependent ecosystems; what I spend my time doing is an expression of love for that interdependence—interspecies care, tending and mending among the layers of community and place. Our work is always reliant on each other's presence and work, our lives interwoven, inherently interdependent on each other. Only with renewal of relationships to one another and to the land does the web weave. There is no gap between humans and nature—we are the natural world and the natural world is us. We can’t go to nature—we are it. 

Collect the first blossoms of Labrador tea, but not too many. Collect some of those dark green and amber fuzzy leaves from last year’s growth.

Dry them for a couple of days and then place them in a glass jar. Cover with your favourite olive oil.

Let this oil infuse slowly over six months.

After the first month, decant some and use it as a facial cleansing oil. Make soap with seawater from near the marsh where you collected the tea.

The unabridged version is published in Issue 13. I was so lucky to meet and work with Carolina Andrade to make the article and you can order Issue 13 to read it all, and if you do, enter the code: BESIDEMEGAN