INDIA FLINT-JULY 2018

‘landmarks’

 plant dyes on repurposed wool skirt

WINDOWSPACE – BEEAC during the month of July welcomes internationally recognised South Australian artist India Flint and her work 'landmarks'. While looking somewhat spare as it hangs in the Beeac window it very much gives a true sense of belonging to the space with the strength of Flint’s effortless stitch and the colour of her surrounds.

'landmarks' is evocative of an aerial view over a parched landscape featuring perhaps an ancient watercourse, or a long ridge of mountains, with creeks and waterways now dried but with the promise of running again to fill lakebeds. It hangs in a billabong shape with the trailing fabric suggesting landscape. 

It is graceful, simple and a privilege to have.

_____________________

Underpinning her practice, Flint describes that most important consideration - a sense of place…

I am botanical alchemist & string twiner, storyteller, forest wanderer & tumbleweed, stargazer & stitcher, working traveller, dreamer, writer and the original discoverer of the eucalyptus ecoprint...dyeing for a living in the deep south.

I work on a rural property at the end of a dirt road, dusty in summer, muddy in the rainy season, dyeing the things that I make with leaves that I gather from the paddocks, in a cauldron over a fire fed with twigs. Small twigs burn bright. My work conflates the visual and written poetics of place and memory, using ecologically sustainable contact print processes from plants and found objects together with walking, drawing, assemblage, mending, stitch and text as a means of mapping country, recoding and recording responses to landscape - working with cloth, paper, stone, windfall biological material, water, minerals, bones, the discarded artefacts and hard detritus of human habitation, the local weed burden. the work has been described as using " the earth as the printing plate and time as the press".

I negotiate a path between installation, printing, painting, drawing, writing and sculpture - immersing myself in and paying deep attention to the environment, gathering thought and experience, imagery and marks, as well as harvesting materials for making; trying to step lightly on the land while being nourished by it. The work of each day, philosophically rooted in topophilia (the love of place), literally begins with a walk.

image courtesy of India Flint  (www.indiaflint.com)

‘landmarks’ has its roots in a walk by a railway track, collecting odd scraps of rusted steel.

The few leaves I used were gleaned not from a forest floor, but from the floor of a florist. The substrate was a wool skirt acquired from a thrift store in New Orleans.

I have a somewhat maternal feeling about the eucalyptus ecoprint, as it originated in my studio in the early 1990s. I first publicly presented it in a paper at the White Nights Textile Symposium in St Petersburg, (Russia) in 1999. The technique has old roots in the dyeing of eggs that was practiced throughout Eastern Europe for thousands of years before Easter was a festival. I simply transferred the process from eggs to cloth using local flora.

I wrote extensively about the eucalyptus and its glorious prints in my MA thesis of 2001 (‘Arcadian Alchemies :: Sustainable Eucalyptus Dyes for Textiles’) but deliberately chose not to patent the ecoprint. Why? Because I was concerned that the technique would be picked up by one of the unscrupulous companies that make a practice of scanning freshly registered patents, and then churned out on an industrial scale. No matter how sustainable a concept is, when industry becomes involved the sheer quantities of (in this case) leaf matter, water and eventual waste material make the whole thing problematic. It seemed much better to share the process with individual makers. My commitment to this art that blooms at the confluence of craft, chemistry, physics, history, botany, medicine and ethnography has been a long one, well grounded in the textile traditions of my family and sometimes it feels as though it’s embedded in my bones.  Each bundle I wrap feels like a gift to myself, each time I unroll one the wonder and delight is as fresh as it was the very first time.

India Flint :: 2018

www.indiaflint.net

instagram@prophet_of_bloom

'Gardens of the Heart' is an international, hand-stitched poetry project convened by India Flint in collaboration with the h.ART group based in Lobethal, South Australia. https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=gardens%20of%20the%20heart 

Linking with the district annual festival of textile and fibre art CrossXpollinatioN, we will hold a local stitch chapter for ‘Gardens of the Heart’ at WINDOWSPACE Beeac Saturday 14 July 2-4pm.

Free, pre-booking required.

Enquiries 0412 337 001 or windowspacebeeac@gmail.com