About
Plants and Colour was created by Flora Arbuthnott to make plant based colour application processes for textiles and paper more accessible. Teaching makers and artists to work with locally available plants to make vibrant and enduring colours for craft, art, and design practices.
Sharing skills for making dyes, inks, and paints out of plants for drawing, painting, printing, and dyeing textiles and paper. Exploring wild and cultivated plants to produce a variety of vibrant colours. Observing and learning from the plants that grow around us.
Working with artists and crafts people around the world who work with locally available plants. Sharing recipes, and processes for exploring the possibilities of the plants that are accessible to grow or forage where we live.
Connecting with an online global community of colour makers, fibre workers, dyers, and printmakers, sharing stories of plant connection, colour explorations, and beautiful work created from handmade paints and inks.
Creating learning communities for sharing stories of our experiences with plants, bringing plant wisdom back into common knowledge again.
Flora came to this practice through her background in textile design and illustration, as well as a desire to connect with the land through working with plants. Wild harvesting invasive plants and weeds such as buddleia flowers, and dock roots, growing dye plants in her garden such as madder, woad, and coreopsis, and working with native species such as oak galls and wild weld. Creating drawings, paintings, and prints as one-off explorations of plant-based surface application bringing together natural dyeing, ink and paint making, and printmaking.
To be wild is to know how to look after ourselves, to be in relationship with the plants growing around us intimately. There are no weeds, only medicines, foods, dye plants, and craft materials.
