postscript for the month in Sydney

It’s two weeks since I’ve been back from Sydney, but there are still things I haven’t got around to posting. What can I say about that month? Things happened slowly, or didn’t get quite beyond the propositional stage, but instead I did spend a lot of time getting lost, enjoying the daily detours with various modes of transport, with stops for picnics in parks and visits to bookshops and cafés, taking on the viewpoint of a tourist to watch out for new sights and curiosities (brilliant blue flowering Jacaranda trees, and sometimes bright red flowing trees, mulberries overhanging Lisa’s neighbour’s fence, luminous sunsets…) I contemplated the people in the park from the studio window, read copious amounts of fiction, found interesting objects at reverse garbage and experimented with printing on the Rizzeria press. Mostly I spent time observing changes in light and the immense variation of the sky and the ground between which I moved.


Some studio activities: Playing around with the yellow film and lenses (which never quite eventuated into what I’d planned) and observing the evening light tinge the walls orange.








Dying with mulberries: Every time I walked past the mulberry tree behind Lisa’s flat, I stopped to pick a few ripe looking berries to eat, and watched my feet for those littering the pavement below. Some had been squashed into the concrete already, spreading out into dark stains, others were cooking slowly in the sun.

For some time I’ve been doing a little research (for an unrelated project) into dyeing fabric with plants from the garden or gleaned from the surrounding neighbourhood. It was something I was just going to do for fun, but the mulberries got me thinking about how it could possibly become part of my work.

I happened to flip through a book on dying with plants in the artisan’s bookshop in Melbourne, months ago. I can’t remember the name of the book, but it described something called “sun dyeing”, a process that works over a long duration and which you have little control over, but with very little work involved.


The recipe from memory:

Take a jar, it can be a dirty one, with remnants of jam or pickles or whatever else was in it, as this can contribute to the dyeing process

Fold up the fabric you want to dye and put it in the jar

Add whatever material or substance you are using as dye and fill with water

Seal the lid tightly and place in a sunny spot for a minimum of one month

When it is ready, take out the fabric. If there is mould present put it in the freezer for a few days. Then wash the fabric to get rid of any of the dyeing substance. Perhaps iron it for added colourfastness (I don’t remember this point, but it makes sense to me.)


So I collected the mulberries from the pavement, picking up even the old hard ones, and put them in a jar with a scrap of silk and water. I left the jar on a shelf in Lisa’s garden, where it might catch a few rays of sunlight, and hopefully in a few months something interesting might emerge.

If anything, it is a nice way to use the sun and the berries that would otherwise go to waste, to produce some kind of small change (a chemical reaction) which would take place over weeks. I hope that it’s something which might test observation with its barely perceptible changes and act as a kind of time keeping, stretching out of time, or making time perceivable.







Umbrellas on the last rainy day:





Meanwhile, Lisa was down in Melbourne working on her inspirational project at Ocular Lab, involving a composting toilet, observations of light, air, water drips and plants, with comfy blankets, reading matter and conversation. See her notes here.