Manitoulin island Chicory portrait by Mariana La France (from her instagram islands in Lakes which is one of those accounts that gives you hope for social media)
In inkmaking workshops people often tell me that they love a certain flower and its colour and ask about how they can make ink out of it and I like to say (because its often true) that flowers have already found their truest colour in their petals and sometimes its best to just leave the flowers to say their thing with the extraordinary pigments that they have intensified from soil and root and leaf. Seen this way the flower is the inkmaker of the plant using colour to convey its message. But its hard sometimes not to try to make ink with flowers or recreate their colour and every once in a while I find a recipe thats work. At the end of summer at the side of the road its the ditch flowers that somehow distill all summer into a pallet for me. Black eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s Lace, vetch and the toughest and most beautiful of all the common weeds the chicory. I am restraining myself from writing about the weird life of the endive, medieval symbolism and all the other rabbit holes that Chicory opens up for me. And anyway I just love that flower. I love the way it loves the road, the way that it kind of closes up in the afternoon and evening and then, by the next day, is mostly fizzled out. But really its that clear sky blue colour that gets me. There is some hint of the hue in woad and in the rare blue ochre of vivianite and maybe Wedgewood china but I am not sure that I will every get a Chicory Blue ink. And maybe I am fixating on the wrong part of the plant anyway. When I study a plant for ink making I often start at the root and chicory does have an impressive root known to dyers and herbalists and pioneers. Suzanna Moodie mentions it along with roasted dandelion root as a substitute for coffee in her Canadian wilderness classic Roughing It in the Bush and it comes up again as a coffee additive in New Orleans coffee. More on field flowers, obscure sources of blue and my fascination with roots at a later date. But for now an encapsulation of the end of summer in a single plant.
My old Studio (note the Chicory coffee can) Photographed by Lauren Kolyn
Pure roasted chicory root boiled in lake water with salt. Usually has a slightly more orangey-brown hue but will have to wait and see how it dries.
Classic Pale Blue 1960s Wedgewood Jasperware which always reminds me of my brother
INKTEST (c. 2018) A better example of the golden brown colour you can get from Chicory Root (I think this might have been on vellum or some other slow drying paper with a bit of gum arabic)
Shop the newletter: (a new section that I might never do again but I just really want to support all these great things)
Cafe Du Monde (kind of weird-tasting but its from New Orleans and makes a great can for brushes afterward and maybe kind of bad coffee is coming back. 2. Lorine Niedecker and you should track her work down. Chicory Blue is totally out of print but this beautiful edition from Wave Books focused on a single poem called Lake Superior and is geology and poetry and exploration all at the same time. 3. My friend Mariana LaFrance who has the beautiful instagram also makes artisanal backpacks which I kind of covet under the label Chemistry and Craft , 4. Suzanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush is still in print with Penguin Randomhouse and explains a lot about Canadians (except that we no longer hate trees) and 5. Make Ink my book natural inkmaking is available from Abrams and in better bookstores all over.
Oh and also my friend RÅ«ta makes these beaded ditch flower earings, pendants and patches that out of this world. Below goldenrod and Chicory.
