In May I took plants from next to the river to print their pigment onto paper. It has rained a lot this spring and the water in the river has been deep with strong currents so, together with timing my visits around low tide, I have had fewer opportunities to visit the river than I would have hoped. But I collected these plants from the slipway down to the river.
Following some videos on Instagram, I interleaved the plants with strong Khadi paper, tied them up and boiled them in water from the river for half an hour. The results were fairly good, though not as good as the ones on Instagram. Perhaps certain plants release their pigment more readily than others. When dry I drew other plants from the river in ink that I had made with river water and local oak galls – see my September 23 post.
I have since learned that it is necessary to use a mordant to fix the natural pigments and improve their lightfastness. The oak gall ink is fairly permanent so I was able to soak the paper in the mordant at this stage. The mordant I used is called Fatakdi and is a type of salt (potassium sulphate) available from Indian groceries. You use one tablespoon for about 500ml water and soak for half an hour. The soaking did however wash away some of natural pigment (back to step 1!!) and so I followed another technique of steaming the papers with more interleaving of plants to try and get new plant prints over the top of my drawings.
After all this I would say overall I had limited success. The pigment from the first printing had almost washed away and the steaming method did not produce very good results. However, I felt the drawings had taken on a real sense of the river – its random patterns and watermarks. I am researching the medicinal use for annotating each of the plants that I drew (there are 12) and this will make a single work mounted on locally sourced recycled plywood.
