Tilke Elkins Of Wild Pigment Project: Cultivating place-based relationships through wild botanical and mineral pigments (podcast interview)
Tilke Elkins (@tilkefinn) is a multi-media social practice artist, and founder of Wild Pigment Project (@wildpigmentproject), an organization that promotes ecological balance and regenerative economies through a passion for wild pigments, their places of origin, and their cultural histories.
She first learned the power of art to effect social change through internships with Bread & Puppet Theater in Vermont and More Gardens in NYC, which champions and protects community gardens. In addition, she was the creative director and illustrator for All-Round, ‘a radical magazine for children ages one to 100 and up,’ and has been a youth mentor for ‘unschooling’ teens since 2001.
In this podcast episode, Tilke sheds light on how synthetic pigments came to dominate the industry of color; how working with place-based, wild-harvested pigments transforms our perceptions of color as consumers, creatives, or as artists; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Tilke and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by The Fruitful Darkness by Trevor Hall (@TrevorHallMusic)
“Being surrounded by so many materials whose history we don’t know has really contributed to our inability to make choices that are positive for the planet.”
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological regeneration, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes!
On our disconnection from the materials that create color:
"The human mind has trouble understanding what petroleum is as a material because it's made of ancient beings. It is organic; it was once ancient plants and tiny sea creatures. But it's hard to look at black sludge and really feel into that history.
So when we make something out of that substance, it almost feels like an abstraction or an idea and less like a material whose history we can feel into and connect with—a tube of red paint feels like the idea of red rather than an actual material, like soil or a plant."
On the social, cultural, and environmental costs of using colors whose origins we do not know of:
“Every material thing that we buy or that we're interested in has a color, so when all of these things have colors whose origins aren't apparent to us, it really contributes to our inability to know what the substance is and where it comes from.
What that does is it cuts us off from being able to have a relationship to materials that are aligned with our ethics: We don't know what the source is, what communities it comes from, who it affects, we don't know what its byproducts are, and we don't know the consequences of the use of that object is. Then, because we're also disconnected from this object's disposal, we're not part of the life-cycle of the material.
I think that being surrounded by so many materials whose history we don't know has really contributed to our inability to make choices that are positive for the planet.”
Final words of wisdom:
"If you're inspired by this topic and it speaks to you, then just choose one pigment—a botanical, a mineral, or waste stream-derived pigment that you can easily find near you. That can be black walnut husks, it could be soil near where you live, it could be scraps of iron or copper that you find in an abandoned lot in an urban area, it could be clumps of clay or pebbles, or it could even be brick fragments that you could grind a make into pigment.
Just choose one pigment, and learn how to forage it and process it safely. Then, integrate that into your art-making practice.
This will be enough to deepen your relationship to the exquisite physicality of the material world and all of the relationships that are a part of it."
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