Started in 2012, Feral and Invasive Pigments is a public fieldwork, writing, and studio-based project that revolves around making watercolor paint from the leaves, petals, and berries of the spontaneous plant beings (aka weeds) who thrive in areas heavily impacted by urbanization, industrialization, and climate change. My paint-making guide is here.
From the brilliant blue of Asiatic dayflower, thriving on copper mine tailings in southeastern China and in monoculture crop fields in the Midwestern US, to the deep magenta of pokeweed, sprouting from deteriorating parking lots in Taipei and concrete riverbanks in Los Angeles, I work with local participants (humans and plants!) to build a living archive of the palettes offered by the vegetal beings who build our shared habitats. Through group harvesting sessions, paint-making, art-creation workshops, gardening experiments, and solo studio and research work, I co-create palettes that directly reflect the land that grew them, and use those palettes to inspire maps, charts, guides, videos and texts that explore plant-human relationships in the face of climate chaos. Making these palettes provides a hybrid, hands-on approach to contending with ecosystems impacted by extraction that is both flexible across habitats and intensely site-specific, while engagement with the vegetal beings who are learning to heal land damaged by extraction is both nourishing and sobering.
The drawings and maps depicted here detail species’ points of origin and spread through contact with humans, while the pigment diagrams demonstrate connections, both metaphoric and physical, between plants, pigments and urban habitats. The workshops and walks focus on ameliorating plant awareness disparity, cultivating cross-species solidarity, human and plant adaptation to life in cities, and of course the multisensorial delights of making and using paint.
Through the gathering, cultivating and processing weedy and feral species on an intimate scale, the project encourages dialogue around the wider implications of labeling certain life forms as “alien”, “exotic” or “invasive” (and thus dispensable/disposable) and develops plant-human connections in habitats where people are often alienated from the vibrancy and central importance of plant life, from sidewalk cracks and strip malls to so-called “vacant” lots and superfund sites. Current updates about the project are accumulating at #invasivepigments, archived blog posts from the project’s early days are here, and additional context for the project can be found on my writing & press page. Also available is my recent zoom lecture, “Feral and Invasive Pigments: Learning with and From Weeds through Ecosocial Art,” part of Eclipta Herbal & Krater’s Invasive Species Proposal Series.
Feral and Invasive Pigments was on view at the Center for Strategic Art and Agriculture from November 7th 2014 – January 15th 2015. The CSAA also hosted the first Invasive Pigments Garden, documented below as it evolved from bare earth in March of 2014 to a towering canopy in the fall. There is a video about that process here: Spring to Senescence.