Natural Ink Making with Food Waste
A Practical Day Workshop With Ione Maria Rojas
10-4pm On Friday 25th April 2025
Venue: Brentor Village Hall, 6 Station Rd, Brentor, Tavistock PL19 0LW
Learn how to make your own inks and pigments from food waste & edible plants in this one day workshop with artist and food grower Ione Maria Rojas.
Ione is interested in the colours we can make from our immediate environment and in making natural colour accessible to all. Ione will show participants how simple it can really be and how most of us already have dye material lying around in our kitchens or growing nearby.
We’ll work with food waste such as onion skins and avocado stones, edible garden plants including nettles and sage, and cupboard store goods like vinegar, coffee and bicarbonate of soda, making a broad range of beautiful colours for drawing and mark making.
Ione will take you through a series of simple colour making techniques, before sharing some playful ways of working with ink and natural colour to develop your own visual vocabulary. She’ll share her working values with you along the way, showing how working with these ingredients can deepen our understanding of land, culture and our place amidst a web of beings.
By the end of the day, you’ll have your own handmade ink to take home with you, as well as any drawings you've made, a recipe card, ideas and references for further art making.
This Workshop is limited to 12 participants.
What is Included:
All materials included, though you are welcome to bring any of your own.
A vegetarian lunch of soup, bread, and salad. Made with the same vegetables and herbs that we will be making inks from.
Tea, coffee, and coffee.
About Ione Maria Rojas:
I am interested in how working with our hands invites us into different forms of connection - with ourselves, with others, with our immediate environment. My practice is multidisciplinary and includes: digging clay, making inks and pigments with found and foraged materials, walking, drawing, writing, facilitating, sowing seeds and listening to birds.
Some questions central to my practice are:
How can small acts of imagination, creativity and making disrupt and dismantle dominant thought systems?
How can working with our hands (in the soil, with clay, through gathering and making) catalyse new conversations or new ways into existing conversations?
How might making materials with elements found, foraged and gathered from our immediate environment teach us about our relationships with and responsibilities for the other-than-humans we share that environment with?
What are the possibilities and challenges of developing a place-based practice as someone with mixed heritage, when home is not a fixed entity?
I am currently based in Devon and have spent the past few years moving between the UK and Mexico, spending time with the friends, family and land I am connected to in each place. https://www.ionemariarojas.com/