Plants For Artists

Natalie Stopka is a New York based interdisciplinary artist and educator focused on the material history of color and sustainable studio practice. She captures material and elemental interactions in her collaborative, experimental printmaking practice. Raised on the south coast of Massachusetts, she holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Natalie is the author of From Plant to Pigment: How to make your own vibrant inks, pastels and paints, published by Skittledog in 2025.

Sarah Grace Dye is a visual artist who loves to find a use for and beauty in the  ephemera of the everyday. Working with these objects has become like an  alchemic practice enabling a transformation to take place. She believes learning to  use the materials that surround us is important and her ethos dictates that it is  important to waste nothing, that everything has a purpose and unique attributes to  be examined, explored, elevated and a new purpose discovered. In essence, to  search out beauty and hope in everything. The resulting alchemic objects are to be  celebrated, shared and treasured. 

Sarah is a collector and uses papermaking, natural dye and ink making, drawing,  cyanotype, stitch and origami to create work, often within book structures, that  amalgamates these together to produce small and perfectly formed keepsakes  that echo the essence of the materials and story they communicate. 

Sarah is a firm believer that everyone has the capacity to be creative and she is  keen, wherever possible, to provide the catalyst for that to be realised. Her belief in  the freedom to play and discover ones own marks is central and she is constantly  developing this area within her own practice.

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.

David Begley is an award-winning Irish artist, filmmaker, charcoal maker, and arts educator. He works across drawing, painting, monotype, video, sound, and animation. He has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally.

His work moves between figuration and abstraction and is often inspired by invented mythologies. To make his large drawings and animations he gathers driftwood along the Wexford coast and bakes it into charcoal, producing a deep, soft black. Flame, smoke, and breath recur throughout his monochrome works, where elemental processes become part of the image itself.

Begley is drawn to the act of discovering an image rather than imposing it, working intuitively with materials until a form begins to reveal itself. This approach is central to his monotypes, where images emerge through gesture, pressure, and chance. Figures surface from darkness and dissolve back into it, inhabiting threshold states between presence and disappearance. Hybrid bodies, watchers, and archetypal forms gather within shifting fields of black, suggesting transformation and myth.

In 2020 he was commissioned by Wexford County Council to create The Monk’s Garden, a visual art, heritage, and gardening project. During this project he began making and painting with botanical inks.

Begley is also a renowned art facilitator and tutor, known for his energy, enthusiasm, and generosity. He leads workshops for adults in museums and public art centres across Ireland including Intuitive drawing at IMMA — the Irish Museum of Modern Art for National Drawing Day 2026. He contributed to Making Charcoal for Artists by Kate Boucher (The Crowood Press, 2024).

David is currently working on a commissioned charcoal animation based on the life of Dutch cellist, Frieda Belinfante (1904 - 1995).

Issy is a textile artist specialising in traditional practices creating natural inks & dyes for textile & paper applications.  She works from her studio in West Yorkshire under the name of ‘abitmoreink’.  She became interested in dyes, and dyeing techniques whilst originally working in theatre, film and television, as a costumier.  For the last 3 years she has been creating an extensive dye garden - growing plants for use in her own practice. Presently, she is focussed on  developing a 3D sculptural work using various traditional craft practices and making paper using plants such as flax and other materials she either grows, or forages locally. In addition to her own practice she regularly delivers workshops at various venues. She also works with many arts based organisations and in schools, to create pieces for exhibitions that explore the narrative of natural dyeing and related processes.

‘I'm focused on growing my dye plants, as I have a large dye garden. I'm more of a generalist when it comes to using the materials I grow and a general experimentalist. Sustainability is at the core of my practice, and more recently my work has been exploring paper-making and sculptural forms. I’ve just co-created an exhibition with children from @makerworldhudds called Biophilic Sculptures as part of the Woven Festival, made entirely from sustainable materials—recycled paper and textiles, naturally dyed with plants from my garden.’

Elisabeth Viguie Culshaw (aka Betty) is a color maker and educator, working only from Nature. Originally trained in Decorative Arts by Christie’s the auction house, she spend her working life in heritage stencilled schemes conservation. 

In 2015 she branched out to the Eco world and is currently essentially working from plants and earth pigments in both Botanical printing and Indigo dyeing. 

Born in France she lives and works in Scotland where she runs a sustainable studio in Glasgow. She frequently travels to teach and learn to France and South East Asia. 

She is the author of “Botanical Printing On Paper” (Crowood press 2026), The online Botanical printing method “The True Colour of the Cotinus”, and grows “The Indigo Plot” an Indigo garden in the grounds of the Glasgow Botanical garden. She runs Eco colours retreats in France and Thailand.

In 2026 she will host “Shades of Blue” a solo exhibition about Indigo in Scotland.

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 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 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. 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.

Greta Desirèe Facchinato (IT/LU) is a research-based multidisciplinary artist and designer. She holds a Masters in Artistic Research from KABK Den Haag (NL) and a Batchelors in Visual and Performance Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (IT). Through the crossflow of different mediums and the investigation of daily life encounters, gestures, and materials her practice invites us to experience matter from an embodied awareness. She runs a studio focused on research and sustainable education through natural materials, illustration and creative workshops. In 2021 with her project Colour is Alive she researched organic ink making for screen printing. Since then she is been working with the knowledge of color and the interconnection with our environment through the practice of making sustainable ink for printing techniques.

Annie Hogg is a visual artist based in Co. Tipperary, Ireland, where she lives and works with Archy, a Hound.

Her work explores power relations and resources. Aiming to see both human and other than human responses and outcomes in human led situations.

She works with natural materials in traditional and innovative ways within her studio based practice predominantly through sculpture and installation, and has recently begun to incorporate social engagement, sound and moving image.

After receiving a BA in sculpture from Aki College of Art, The Netherlands, she worked on environmental campaigns, studied organic horticulture returning to a full time creative practice in recent years. These tendrils remain important within her visual language.

Annie enjoys delivering engaging workshops, talks and lectures on materials and processes within her own practice and the greater realm of natural colour and material use.