I am flying in with a quick post... although I could spend ages putting a post together on the work of India Flint I will link you instead to some sites where you can explore things yourself. She needs no introduction to many... but just in case ... from the home page of her website:
"i am an artisan and writer specializing in bio-regional ecologically sustainable plant dyes ...welcome to my workroom"
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| * india's photo of the workroom in the territory |
And what a workroom it is... dessert floor, hotel sink, plane seat or kitchen table ... the tone of everything she does is authoritative without the attitude... the real thing one might say.
And not only that... she makes space for others, shares endlessly, is widely and sometimes rudely and outrageously appropriated without acknowledgement ...but then has the chutzpah to set things straight in style with no nonsense!
She is a conduit between past and future ... and oh how we need people of authentic vision and application like hers... in every single facet of human life at this time. Essentially her work is midwifing a whole deeper sense of what's possible for using what we find in nature around us... and in our neighbourhoods, homes and cupboards for that matter.
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| india's photo ... sharing |
Nothing is surface... nothing in excess. All so artfully and continually brought in and pieced together... part of a continuity of cultural practices on the one hand and a pioneer on the other. Go explore... see what I mean. Many are continuing or refinding a love of fabric, textiles and such they inherited from family and community... all round the globe people industriously pursue this tradition... or innovate things anew.
Perhaps without India though... we might not have seen such a singular need to do it with such enormous shared integlligence and depth of learning... with vision for the artfulness of each part of the working, teaching and sharing process.... words and all!
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| India's photo ... from her life on the move! |
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| india's photo ... botanical alchemist at large |
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| india's photo... earth is close by. |
Colour's long shaped my life ... ever since my parents gave me colour pencils aged five. Perennially its the thing most have commented on about my work - for good or bad. In Melbourne from 1994 to 1998 I offered consecutive Tuesday night 8 week courses 'Colour workshop' at the Collingwood shop-front Studio business I ran as Themata Studio. More recently I've been reminded how challenging my class exercises were (thankfully they used the word fun too) when I would ask the group to draw the smell of coffee or the feel of raw wool or some far-fetched thing.
What was going on for me in those classes was my need to address the distance between the world and us... between nature and us... our senses and our minds.... between colour and feeling. This was my laboratory and I was finding my way back to the things that mattered in my own art work..and I was bringing people along for the exploration... humbly knowing all the long that I was learning far more than I was teaching!
The depth of India's immersion in colour and ecology could lead me to be immensely intimidated by how little I know. But I'm not covetous... awe is more the word. Grateful people like her bring these things to life that they choose to live by, share what they've learned, and give people an opportunity to be saturated in valuable ideas in exchange for the rewards of doing that. If anything I take inspiration from her to go back and pull together the most worthwhile learnings of my own unfolding practice and experience.... to be more fully conscious of and engaged with the processes that are arising out of my own nature and relationship with nature.... whatever the limitations of those two things are.
The prize we need to be looking to, at this time in human history, is surely to be working in the direction of sustaining the natural inheritance we came into this world able to appreciate. Nothing is so valuable, so priceless as the living systems into which we were born. Our greatest task is to see ways to be active participants in the challenge to preserve what we possibly can... no matter what we do or where we are.
