Collective Colour

On "Trading Experience" in Turkey

“To spark your community, you’ve got to get people together and help them start talking. Stay with it! The missing ingredient in many would-be communities is dedication. We put on one-off events or annual fundraisers, but we don’t give potential community members the chance to keep showing up or to raise their hands to take on responsibilities.”
— Get Together: How To build A Community With Your People by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Soto

Here is a picture of Kai. I met Kai a few years ago through my friend and long-time ink collaborator, Marta Abbott . He was delivering a perfectly-compacted lozenge of solid Japanese white ink that Marta had bought for me in Japan at the most amazing store in the world. I traded this solid-white ink gift for a mini-poster I made that said, “Murky is Beautiful,” with three handmade stripes of Toronto Ink colour on it. I met Kai in an empty modernist all glass apartment in the treetops overlooking High Park and he told me a bit about himself.

Kai is a photographer, a surfer, a kind of digital guru living in Singapore, who got close to the top of Facebook, and then close to the top of Instagram, and then got out to raise teenagers and surf, and to use his incredible big-social-movements-and-financial-structures brain to observe and work with powerful ground up communities. He co-wrote a kind of bible with Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh called, Get Together, and they formed a company called, People and Company, that works and learns with product designers in Kenya, a Florida retirement home, and big companies like Porche, and Nike, and they just got bought-up by Substack.

Kai has really got me thinking about community in a satisfyingly practical way. At the heart of the book, Get Together, is this notion that you can’t make a community for people but that you have to make it with people, and that you have to keep making it for it to be really alive. This month, because I am working on building a travelling pop-up ink factory that will require a makeshift team of local experts, I think this idea of a kind of self-building, and self-sustaining community, might be the right way to think about the natural colour revolution.

I know I have said this before, but there is a revolution brewing and ironically for such a place-based, tactile, hand-made, ditch-your-computer-and-get-outside kind of revolution, it’s really spreading on social media. When I wrote Make Ink, I started using the hashtag #makeink, mostly because I was curious to see what people were getting up to with my book. I just noticed today that the hashtag has 15,621 posts on Instagram. And I know it’s just 15K posts in a sea of billions, but it’s also a growing record of real, tactile, world-altering interventions. There’s Sam Hodge working with river Thames coal. The forgotten blue wode brought to light by Milan-based illustrator, Isabella Conti. There is Ruth Siddall & Jo Volley’s World Pigment Day experiments with Knopper galls. Through the hashtag I found a 31st-anniversary painting using all botanical inks from Denise DeGidio on the shores of Lake Superior, and a discarded sculpture’s dust mixed with black walnut ink from Tilke Elkin’s, Wild Pigment Project. Climate artist Nichole van Beek has a plant-based ink show at One River School in Woodbury, NY, and Christi York’s is exploring the possibilities of arbutus bark ink in North Cowichan. Scrolling through these creators you can see and sense a community of natural ink makers that, while drawing upon thousands of years of tradition is connected and connecting in ways that are radically new. A colour community that starts from the ground and whose rhizomes go planet-wide.

I wanted to point to just one particular and important leader among the natural ink revolution, who kindly sent me pictures and answered my questions this week.

Birnur Temel of Milk.ist lives in a village in the northwest of Turkey where she connects farming to art, and has been travelling around Turkey to work with kids in natural ink making workshops.

I say leader, but when I interviewed Birnur— who has been running 151 workshops across Turkey involving the UN, The Ministry of Educations, various NGO with hundreds of kids who don’t have easy access to art supplies or fancy schools— she didn’t talk about too much about being a teacher or leader. Instead she talked about trading experience. She talked about learning, about expanding and growing.

Born in Istanbul Temel was raised in Canada. She graduated from NASCAD with a double major in sculpture and art history, and then she returned to Turkey to farm and work with local colour. Below are some of her pictures and thoughts on her experiences.

“The ancient city of Dara, which is located in the south-eastern city of Turkey, Mardin, is one of the ancient cities of upper Mesopotamia and dates back to 6th century, the early Byzantine Empire. The ruins are near and all over the houses in villages. I was lucky enough to have a workshop there with the help of the women of Dara, and we made our inks in the middle of the village’s agora, which was truly magical. You’d be surprised with the vividness of nettle leaves, poppy flowers, pomegranates and walnuts there, to name a few; olive trees are also part of the livelihood.”

“The south is vibrant with oranges and yellow, the north is full of greens and blues, and the eastern south is rich in red. The colour palette carries the seasons and the local landscape.”

“The farmer in you, guides the artist that you are,” Birnur says. “The changing soil and climate play a big role in our colour palettes.”

“Failures are very informative. When you are not concentrated on winning but playing the game, nothing fails; everything is a gain, be it knowledge or experience.”

I love these pictures. I love how specific they are to their place and at the same time how universal they are. Kids playing with colour. How much simple power is contained in noticing and coming together and playing with natural colour. I love that Birnur is sticking to her project. She’s working on a book, a map, and a set of colour kits that naturally emerge from her workshops. I promise to share more when it becomes available in English. I miss in-person workshops, and I can’t wait to get learning and teaching again. I hope that you, dear readers, will join the colour community maybe by continuing to use the hashtag #makeink and that you might consider yourself one of the community’s multitudes of leaders, even if you are only just waking up to it. Next Week? The search for wild grape ink continues. Have a great weekend.