Featured Artist Series

This is part of a series of blogs featuring inspiring artists and craft people who work with local natural materials.

Caroline living in the woods for a week just off to get water, nettles and chalk

My creative practice changes with the seasons and the years, responding to gluts and shortages in foraged goods, gift ochres arriving from friends, feathers moulted by the swans, a finding-trip to a new environment. It has not always been so. For many years I told myself what to do, what I was allowed to do, to draw, to make. How I came to be mainly free of the vice-like grip of the machine is a meandering story, but here’s the gist.

After 6 years at art college, and an MA in Painting from Chelsea School of Art, in 1996 I still had no clue where I could belong in the London art world. I have drawn since I could hold a pencil, and that’s why I wanted to be an artist, drawing gives permission to pay attention to the world in detail. That inquisitiveness was why my other love at school was science, particularly chemistry and physics. I had a fantastic 2-year Foundation course at Shelley Park, Bournemouth, a dedicated foundation art college taking up the whole of the historic home of Mary Shelley and her son, where she came to live after the death of her husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here I had been shown real gold: colour theory, drawing skills, printmaking, photography, ceramics, textiles, and so much more, by people passionate about their work and about teaching. Stepping out into the world 6 years later, I knew that my enthusiasm and multiple artistic inclinations would see me labelled as eccentric, or worse, the dreaded insult: earnest. So, like so many artists before, I formed a band, and for 10 years played music, sung, toured the world and recorded records, formed a record label, co-ran our recording studio, all in a team; because to make art this way with others using sounds and words felt right.

Ink drawing from autumn 2020, oak gall ink on rag paper.

When I was living up in Aberdeenshire, visual art slowly came back into my life, and I have Deveron Arts (now Deveron Projects) to thank for that. Being part of a wider art scene in a much more sparsely populated rural area meant that when we put on an event or had something musical or creative to teach or show, that there was an audience who were not jaded or overwhelmed with a panoply of events. The world of individual artists as megastars seemed very far away, (despite our old ‘gang’ in London having included Turner Prize winner, due to my then husband co-founding the studios and gallery, Cubitt Artists). Now, surrounded by trees and deer, hawks and rivers, I found the seeds of a new way to make art, that would flourish when I returned to London in 2006, mainly to study more deeply with my T’ai Chi master, after 6 years away.

Basket of materials which lives next to my drawing desk

Finding The Dark Mountain Project in late 2014 changed the course of my art life again. I had returned to drawing with a passion and was studying Renaissance and traditional art materials at The Royal Drawing School with Daniel Chatto. When I read Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘The Wake’ after it gained a glowing review in the Guardian and did something I rarely do: looked up the author. This led me to Dark Mountain, and to going to their events, submitting art and writing, and now, years later, finding DM near the core of my artistic practice, how I show work, and who I collaborate with. Here at last, and also now with The Wilderness Art Collective, I found a broad group of artists and writers, makers and thinkers who also create work in the context of our living planet under great threat. It seems to me slightly ridiculous to make art of any kind that wilfully ignores this existential planetary predicament. Business as usual is the way of commerce and politics, and almost to be expected. But seeing this common in cultural worlds was depressing. In 2017, when asked by Paul to introduce myself to participants on a workshop I was teaching at Way Of Nature’s ‘Fire and Shadow’, a voice from inside me blurted out, to my own great surprise, ‘I am a devotional artist.’

Small works in handmade natural watercolour paint on deer parchment for Dark Mountain Sanctum

The last 4 years have been a journey into finding out what that spontaneously uncivil savant meant. ‘Devotion’ is an unpopular term, old-fashioned perhaps. But it sums up how I feel about earth.

So far, this journey means no longer dictating form. It means using almost entirely natural materials, foraging and finding, reusing and researching. The inconsistencies and quirks of materials which are not machine-made keeps me attentive and absorbed. Time and practice have synthesised 25 years of T’ai Chi and Tao, my love of bushcraft and wilderness skills, and my drawing and crafts into one thing. Often this takes the form of drawings with a quill pen in iron gall ink on deer skin parchment and paper books, all of which I make myself from waste materials. Sometimes I work for a period exclusively on Grave Goods, an ongoing collection of items and garments which I intend to be buried with me. I’ll be showing some of these at ‘Borrowed Time’ in November, and they’ll be in the next Dark Mountain book this spring. I teach life drawing, practice various fibre and textile arts, make leather and buckskin, and find time for other natural material handcrafts using bark, wood, stones, bone and so on. I find sanity in grinding ochres for paint, making ink from botanicals and plying cordage from plant fibres. My work is found in magazines, books, periodicals, sometimes in shows in galleries or online, but most often within the pages of Dark Mountain. Much of my work is bought privately and now has a life on the walls and in the homes of people all over the world, who may have seen it on my website or on Instagram. It is good for my art to have its own life, beyond my little boat, and to be in relationship with other eyes and minds.

I forage rather than grow most of the plants I use, particularly oak galls, lime tree inner bark, prunus gum and leaves and nettles. In 2020 I was about to start an allotment of plants for inks, but arthritis has meant this isn’t possible just now. However, I was always a gatherer, and though I would love to again be a gardener, the riverbanks and seashores where I spend most of my time offer such a wealth of materials to the ethical forager, I would barely have time to tend the woad, madder or marigolds I had planned for the year ahead. Swaps with other colour people are common and a huge joy. I provide a yearly pigment for the Wild Pigment Project, which is a source of real community and learning for me. Right now two parcels of ochres are on their way to Tilke Elkins, and post gods willing, should be winging their way round the world in the late spring.

A constant in my life since childhood has been a procession of inspiring and talented teachers. Some teachers who have been really instructive for me since returning to England have been Joe O’Leary (@joescraft), Theresa Emmerich Kamper (@traditional_leather), Daniel Chatto, David Cranswick (@alchemyofpaint). Mostly I prefer to learn skills in person, and then practice on my own. Books come a close second. Videos come last, which is ironic, as that’s what I get asked most to create for my own students. So I am rather latterly teaching myself to make and edit instructional films, as Paul Kingsnorth and I will be teaching Wild Twins Course for the third time this year, but online rather than in the wilds of Cork, Ireland. We bring words and the image together, using myth and story, hand making all our materials, sending ourselves out into the wild to really listen to nature. It’s a distillation of all the work we both care about, and I am so looking forward to teaching it this April. All 18 places filled up and I feel really lucky to soon share what I love.

After being suddenly evicted from my purpose-built boat studio and mooring last September, I now work in the saloon of my new little boat upriver and store all my materials here and in my new shed. It may not be ideal, but it was warm and convenient over the winter, and I got on with lots of projects. 2021 sees teaching Wild Twins, an ink residency at @knockvologan.studies on Mull, creating site-specific art materials at The Sidney Nolan Trust with Wilderness Art Collective in the summer, and exhibiting Grave Goods and talking at Borrowed Time symposium at Dartington in November. In 2022 I will hopefully be working on a Dark Mountain book collaboration, which I can’t talk about yet!

Teaching paint making on the Wild Twins Course

My feeling is, after almost 50 years on this incomparable planet, among beloved human and non-human neighbours, that my art is a natural response to how things are for this particular organism, moment to moment. This means I will never be someone who bangs out a cohesive-looking body of similarly made work for 20 years and has a gallery to represent them. Instead I shall remain a tributarian, a meanderthal, a craftcrastinator, found in nooks and cracks like a dandelion or an ink cap, and be happier for it. For many years, my art came out in lyrics, melodies, harmonies and basslines. Now I take a line for a walk with a quill dipped in blackest ink. But looking back from where I am now, I can see the winding path through it all, and am still really interested to see where it will lead. So I will stay out here to make art where earth matters, sending tendrils out into the wider world with the brambles and rocks, as part of nature, and not in the airless hall of polished mirrors that is the mainstream (so-called) culture.

Links to all my recent work, exhibitions, publications, essays and projects can be found at www.carolineross.co.uk . There are also regular posts from my process at Instagram @foundandground

You can search for my name at www.wildernessart.org to see work from the recent show ‘Wilderness of the Mind’.

www.dark-mountain.net has two essays, including one about my ochre on rock artwork for the cover of issue 13. My art and writing are in 7 issues of the book from issue 9 onwards.