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In Color

Natural Dyes as Modes of Site Observation and Inquiry



In Color: Natural Dyes as Modes of Site Observation + Inquiry was an independent project conducted by Rebecca Hinch (MLA, 2021) and advised by Bradley Cantrell between September and November 2020. The project, structured around the process of natural dyeing with plants and other organic materials found at Milton Airfield, sought to explore the potential of the natural dyeing process, including the foraging, harvesting and processing of dye materials, as a method of field work in landscape architecture. The project included explorations in the representation of seasonal change in the landscape over time, specifically as it relates to the natural dyeing process and resulting colors.

The project began as a means to explore how a historical crafting method could be used to document change over time, and yet also served as an inquiry of how color, and aesthetics more generally, shape our experience of the landscape. Without a destination, what colors and texture pull us to a given place? When harvesting is the goal, what do we notice that we previously overlooked, or wouldn’t otherwise notice? What can natural dyeing teach us about plants and other found materials beyond what we can see at first glance? The project concluded with a newfound appreciation for the subtleties of seasonal change and time-intensive processes.


Harvested Materials and Dye Results


09-17-20 Walk
1.  Wingstem
2. Yellow Crownbeard
3. Purpletop
4. Field Goldenrod
5. Indiangrass
6. Winged Sumac 10-01-20 Walk
7. Beaked Panic Grass
8. Little Bluestem
9. Swamp Thistle
10. Spicebush 
11. Holly Olive
12. Canada Goldenrod 10-15-20 Walk
13. Pennsylvania Swartweed
14. Chinese Bushclover
15. Mugwort
16. Marsh Mallow
17. Smooth Alder
18. Turkey Tails 10-25-20 Walk
19. Eastern Red Cedar
20. Virginia Pine
21. River Birch
22. Climbing Dock 11-08-20 Walk
23. Broomsedge
24. Common Mullein
25. Autumn Olive
26. Yarrow
27. Oriental Bittersweet

DATA COLLECTION.
To capture temporal changes in the landscape, I structured the harvesting and dyeing process around five walks. Every two weeks, I parked my car in the same place and walked in the direction of color, and admittedly over time, I was guided by the desire to discover a new area of the site in pursuit of a yet unseen plant. My walks and harvests had four limitations: 1) a maximum of six dye materials per walk, or six one-gallon bags of dye material, which I found was the most I could carry at a time, 2) only harvesting a given material once, 3) the bounds of the Milton Airfield site, as it is bordered  by private property, and 4) the individual site visit time, which was at most two hours. I also did my best to adhere to the indigenous harvesting principles described by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), such that I did not harvest something if there was only one visible individual, and I only harvested 10% of the plant or fungal material present, both in an attempt to avoid depleting a plant or fungal community and food sources. In terms of  dyeing, I repeated the same process for each material, and dyed 15 x 15” pieces of muslin fabric for easy comparison.






EXPERIMENTS IN REPRESENTATION.
Along with gaining more intimate tactical knowledge of the harvested materials, illustrating this process challenged my representation skills. Of the few landscape architecture projects centered on natural dyeing that I could find, these projects appear as art installations, focused on the display of the resulting dyed fabric. While attractive and somewhat informative, these installations seem to say little about the experience of harvesting or dyeing, the plants harvested, or the landscape that those plants were found. My experiments in representation ranged from expressing the experience of harvesting and the associated loss of the human scale (collage, right) as well as mitigating the separation from the landscape that occurs once dye material is harvested, as dyeing took place off-site.  Overall, the project pushed my ideas about what “seasonal color”  really means and how color shapes our movement on site.


This was an early attempt at bringing the color produced by the dye process back into the landscape at Milton Airfield. Here, a field of Little Bluestem is contrasted first with a white piece of fabric and then with a “dyed” piece of fabric made from the resulting Little Bluestem dye. While it was interesting to see just how greatly the dye color (green) differed from the plant color in the field (reddish purple), this sort of installation suffered the same fate of the projects that I wanted to critique: it primarily functions as a display of the dye results, rather than an expression of the process and the source landscape. I say “dyed” here because although I did dye my usual 15 x 15” muslin square with Little Bluestem dye, I did not produce enough to dye the amount of fabric pictured, so the image on the right was edited in Photoshop.

By accident, I realized the way that I was organizing the resulting dyed fabric colors resembled traditional color palettes used in design and art. This association pushed me to apply what could be called seasonal color palettes to photos of the landscape that defined a given walk for me. As the harvester and dyer, the resulting images captured my walks and the dye process better than site documentation typically emphasized in landscape architecture degree programs, such as a photomontage. Overall, this experiment provoked my preconceived ideas of seasonal color, which I’d categorize as fairly traditional (e.g. warm red, orange and gold tones for fall, bright green and yellow for summer, etc.) prior to this experience. For example, rather than defining an entire 3-4 month season with a few colors, there is a great visual difference in at least central Virginia’s landscape in early October (top right image) as opposed to late October (bottom center image) that the processes of harvesting and dyeing helped to reveal.  Images in chronological order from the center top image (09-17-20 walk) to the bottom right image (11-08-20 walk).


After a few attempts at combining the dyeing process and the site experience into one legible image, I created this model to express the experience of walking around Milton Airfield in search of color, and where that given color (and dye material) mapped to my body, as this was an important consideration for harvesting. The resulting image plays on the idea of a “color field,” which at least in regards to painting, has been described as when “color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject itself,” (National Gallery of Art, 2011). In many ways, while my project’s subject matter is undoubtedly color, the experience of harvesting and producing color is completely subjective. The resulting dyes were determined by my individual inclinations, including the specific hues that I was attracted to in the field, how I processed them, and even my specific body dimensions, which determined the heights that I could reach to harvest material from and the distance I was able to walk in the site visit time allotted on a given day. Considering this, the process of natural dyeing, at least as it was defined in this project, was highly personal, and while perhaps not easily replicable or extremely informative in the traditional sense of data accumulation, it was much more memorable than the usual field work methods that I’ve conducted as a landscape architecture student. For this reason, I believe this method could be useful to other designers who have the desire and time to intimately know a site, and understand its subtle changes over time specific to the human-body experience.


At the conclusion of the semester, Katherine Rossi used the dyed samples to design and craft the textile wall hanging seen here.