I’ve been making these inks, dyes, extractions – I’m perhaps even more unsure than before what to call them – for a few months. Not every day. Some days I just don’t want to have to think about what to do, or how to do it. 
In a single afternoon I watched the wind strip the cherry tree. Last leaves, back-lit by the sun, waving then falling. The garden was a carpet of yellow and I did not take a single photograph.

yellow escapes brown

Bleeding into still –

Wet parts of paper

Under the iron’s heat

Drawing one feature

Out of the other.

Under the Scotswood Bridge, we cast a little yellow bucket over the railings. Phyllis’ photograph has been colourised with ‘July Morning Black’ ink I made from a handful of mahonia berries picked on a day a storm never quite arrived. They were combined with the splash of rust water we managed to scoop from the river.

There was only a small amount of ink and I used it all in the process of ‘feeding’ the pools of liquid as they were absorbed and moved around the paper, staining the river, seeping into the skin.

Fallen Virginia Creeper leaves

Nothing on paper in spite

The promise of rubies

This red will remain

Sealed in a vessel.

Resolve to let it

Run away

retreat into air

Blackberries are like purple smiling paint bombs. We pick hundreds, eat a lot and bring home enough to make a gorgeous blue – like night. 

We pick the moon. Pinch it

Between a thumb and a finger.

Don’t crush it, I say,

Let’s eat it. I throw mine up

Before you look into space

Where your moon should be.

I’ve lost you I think.

Then you smile, purple, side-eyed

Biting into air, slurping

Juice bursting from your lips.

More Mama, more moon!

The dyed papers and inks are lovely and I think I am going to struggle to draw on and with them. I am distracted by their selves. The papers are each a landscape. The ink thickens with its own sugars, and leaks leaving reservoirs of colour and pattern. It rolls through the mordant slowly like a smoke ring. 

I print and dye some photographs that Phyllis took of our walk to the river to collect the water. I soak the images in pure river water mordant. The walk, the river, my son are immersed in their own subject matter. The process reveals an unseen terrain within and upon these landscapes. An essence; tide lines, sediment layers, impressions of the horizon, outlines of billowed clouds left by ever decreasing pools, desiccated rust flecks blink like the shoreline of a salt lake at sunset.

My home studio, for making inks and dyes from rusty water and plants, is our kitchen and the picnic table in our tiny garden. There are traces of the last 20 months all around – everything is within reach and things pile up on top of and fall into each other. 

I gently simmer our nettles in a splash of river mordant water, stirring a new wooden spoon through a tiny milk pan. It immediately goes green. I know plants are full of colour, of course I do, but this is a bit like witnessing alchemy.

And so, we fell into Iron Water.

It’s mordant bite fixes to then become

Lightfast. Waterfast.

Shifting colour, dulling and deepening

Streaks of thin grey, saddening the shade.

Lip pink. Blush brown.

Introduce this ichor carefully now

Its ferrous grip will eat right through your soft things

Bridge nuts. Boat bolts.

Images taken by Phyllis June 2021

I am becoming an iron water mum; an ongoing two-way process of mattering – bringing something to matter through action, or gesture. A becoming drawn out of the immateriality that exists within and between bodies. Tenuous, conditional, strenuous – a labour. It slips within and out of the folds of tradition, of heritage, lineage, of unconditionality. It seeps through hairline cracks in the stuff of permanence. It is ‘autogenesis’ – that which ‘creates life through non-living things’.

In June I met online with textile artist, Maisie Utting to talk about making dyes and paints using plants and other stuff gathered from my nearby surroundings. I described wanting to take a walk, with Phyllis and our son, down to the river to collect water to paint with, and to gather plants and materials on the way that could be used to make the paper and the colour I use in my animation work.

We talked of tears

Rubbing leaves. Brown

Skins boil and run

Down through the green

Sting of nettles.

Thistle milk

Buttercup juice.

Considered cuts

Stems seep. Straining

Water drops let

Soft stains bring forth

Palettes of place.

Dyeing the ground.

Deepening tone.

Plants – their uses, histories and meanings – are overwhelming. Just thinking about their names trips me with stories and symbolism. I said I hoped a walk would limit pathways, and that choices of flora would be governed by the direction we took, and therefore practical and straightforward. A walk provides the subject. A beginning and an end. A source

I know where we will go.

Down the bank beside our house there is a road that no longer leads anywhere – even the decorative coal truck that marked the entrance to the housing estate has been removed. It is a patch of land that only recently was a demolition site. As we walked to the river, we watched 200 or so houses just go. The last remaining invisible resident had defiantly drawn their nets to the diggers and skips until they too disappeared. Now, the road has folded into the fragments of the buildings and belongings, gardens, and fences. A light shade, a red-hatted gnome, a flash of mirror, a yellow square of bathroom-wallpapered plaster. What has not been picked over at night, becoming slowly consumed by vegetation. Now there are desire paths through dog roses, buddleia, celandine, vetch, dandelion clocks, ferns, daisies, poppies, clover.

We talked about ephemeral colour, of barely present marks made with watery strokes. I realised then that I didn’t mind if my paintings dry up and leave barely a trace on paper once they have been digitally documented.

Over the field and across the road is a path to the river’s edge. Images taken by Phyllis, June 2021

I told Maisie I wanted the water used in my work to have passed through places that mean something to the three of us – our rivers.

I wanted the walks to conclude with the collecting of water that flows through places we recognise as part of our individual selves. I wanted those waters to help shape our new, collective identity.

I wanted those waters because they contain traces of the places passed through most recently, and through the course of its ancient continuous flow; hills, clouds, bodies of humans, plants and animals, seas, lakes, rain, snow, breath, puddles, the centre of the earth and the edges of our biosphere.

I wanted the water to be a creative material that I could use to make work.

I wanted this water to symbolise the role, existence and process of becoming a mother through adoption and within a queer, lesbian household.

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