Minerals For Artists

Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published spring 2025. Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice. After the rooks have feasted on the riverbank, the empty mussel shells become paint palettes. The seasonally moulted flight feathers of local swans and geese become quill pens and brushes. Chalk dug out from their setts by badgers is left in piles in the woods, where she gathers it and take it home to make gouache. Caroline makes paints from foraged earth pigments from around the UK, and art tools and inks from natural, wild, and found materials such as oak galls, rusty nails, elderberries, bay leaves and cherry tree gum. The natural fluctuations of materials and the botanical ink stains or ochre paints forming prepared grounds on paper, all suggest forms with which she works.

Lucy Mayes is an artist and pigment maker & researcher working in London and Hampshire. Her work as ‘London Pigment’ uses urban waste stream materials to make recycled pigment. Her practice is centred on the use of unusual, surprising or esoteric raw materials to make colour as a way of documenting events or ‘happenings’. Verdigris made from copper wire stripped from burnt-out mopeds, soot and ash from park fires and construction rubble have all been used in her work to make new pigments. Her colour-making practice centres on creating sustainable pigments from anthropocene waste streams. She works in the capacity of pigment/colour consultant and has worked with Neptune Interiors Ltd, Jaguar Land Rover, Royal Cornwall Museum, V&A, Kew Gardens on pigment projects. She previously worked as product developer and pigment specialist at renowned colourman L.Cornelissen & Son where she developed their historical pigment archive. She teaches pigment making at institutions nationally and hopes to re-orientate our connections to colour; through the creation of intimate relationships with matter formed through embodied making.

Carolyn Sweeney is an artist and art teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She uses mineral and botanical color on paper, mostly foraged from public roadways and the compost piles of neighbors. Carolyn has a BA in Fine Art from Whitman College and later studied textiles at Oregon College of Art and Craft. It was in the midst learning to weave and spin that Carolyn first encountered natural color, using natural dyes for her textile projects. After having a child she went back to working on paper, and started making botanical inks from her natural dye plants. From there she discovered mineral pigments and making her own watercolor paints. She now uses a variety of handmade artist materials- watercolors, lake pigments, pastels, egg temperas, soy wax crayons, and others that defy neat categories. She is also a beginning papermaker, and paper nerd. 

Carolyn’s own art practice seeks to center these natural materials as co-creators, finding inspiration in the relationships between humans, plants, and the very earth beneath our feet.