December 2024 Update from Flora:
While adjusting to early motherhood, I’m loving programming online events with brilliant craftspeople and artists, offering my platform to share their work and skills with you, and that is what I plan to continue to do next year, while getting back in the studio more and more without pressure.
Thank you for sticking with me, and I look forward to being able to be more creative next year, and share more with you!
About
Plants and Colour was created by Flora Arbuthnott to make plant based colour application processes for textiles and paper more accessible. Encouraging you to work with locally available plants to make vibrant and enduring colours for craft, art, and design practices.
Learn how to make 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 wish to transition their practice to working with locally available plants. Sharing recipes, and processes for exploring the possibilities of the plants that are accessible to grow or forage where you live. Connect with an online global community of botanical ink and paint makers, dyers, and printmakers, sharing stories of plant connection, colour explorations, and beautiful artwork created from handmade paints and inks. Creating learning communities is a very important part of Plants & Colour, for sharing stories of our experiences with plants, bringing plant wisdom back into common knowledge again.
Flora came to this practice through a desire to connect with the land. Working with plants such as camellia and buddleia flowers, oak galls, and dock roots, or growing dye plants in her garden such as madder, woad, and coreopsis. Creating drawings, paintings, and prints as one-off explorations of plant-based surface application bringing together natural dyeing, ink and paint making, and printmaking.
Growing up in the countryside in Gloucestershire, Flora was taught to paint and print by her mother as a child. Following a degree in product design at Glasgow School of Art, she sought to reconnect with her family roots in textiles and printmaking, as well as with the natural raw elements of where materials come from. She was drawn to Devon to study permaculture (Earth Activist Training), horticulture (Schumacher College), and wild plants (Ffyona Campbell & Rhizome).
Flora’s interest in plants and fungi go beyond colour. She is committed to living and working in rhythm with the seasons, the foraging and growing food, dyes, and medicines.
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.
