Catherine Shapiro: The Colour Garden: Creating and working with natural pigments

This talk is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GnWIU6c6WQ

Catherine Shapiro talked about her experiments with growing indigo and other plants and making them into pigments and dyes. She showed us examples of what you can grow as art materials in your own garden.

 

Here are three books that Catherine recommends for research: 

Catherine Shapiro went to the San Francisco Art Institute for a couple of years in the late 1960’s and immigrated to Canada in 1970. Settling in the Caribou with her husband, they set up a printmaking studio and Catherine started gardening. Moving to Vancouver in 1974 she continued making multimedia work that expressed her growing knowledge about plants focusing on women’s contributions to the development of horticulture. In the 1980’s Catherine began making environmental works from plant materials that she foraged or grew including nettle, hemp, cedar, wisteria, artichoke, mallow, flax and bamboo. These interests have continued to inform her work and have given her the opportunity in the last few years to mentor a young artist in growing and processing indigo as well as to be artist in residence at MOP garden to continue this project.  Working with indigo has lead her to making a wide variety of paints from botanicals sources which she has been using recently on a new series of cast paper sculptures and paintings.