Dust to Dust

Wherein I fulfil an in ink order with pigments from the streets of Toronto

tickets and information here

WORKSHOP ALERT

Before I get into talking about dust I wanted to tell you and especially if you are New York friends and colour family that I have a workshop next Saturday at The Painting School. It is school is run by Sara Wooster who wrote a book called painting can save your life it in Carrol Gardens Brooklyn and its community meets colour meets foraging and we will make all sorts of ink and I am very excited and there are a few places left. (or there were when I wrote this) I hope you can join us! Also Even though its last minute we really want to do a screening there of the documentary The Colour Of Ink and taking a little poll to see if you would be interested in coming.

Dust

Its a beautiful day and down at street level there is a lot to see when you are searching for dust. According to the dictionary dust is"fine, dry particles of earth or other matter so light that they can be raised and carried by the wind," And I am thinking of the great black clouds of the dustbowl the invisible specks of the Sahara turning the sky orange and burying everything. Sometimes the dictionary distinguishes dust from fine dirt by saying that it is “a vast collection of small, granular particles with no value or usefulness,” but of course this depends what you call useful. I am making Toronto Street dust ink the street fair is going strong and I am trying to find a place where the painted brick is flaking, where the brick and a few layers of paint have fallen to the ground beside a bottle cap that must be historical. I like that dust is a product of time that it’s a kind of settling, that it’s the outward-most layer of soft velvety death that covers everything.

ouroboros_press

I got a commission a couple of weeks ago to make a bottle of Toronto street dust ink. It was a DM request and the client was persistent and I was intrigued by the idea. Strangely no one had ever asked me for street dust ink and although I am a bit behind on my inkmaking projects I could not help but start researching and bring my little broom and ziplock bags out into the field. Dust is made of diverse things it might be pollen or organic materials or microscopic grains of sand or some combination of all this and other matter light enough to be blown in the wind. And so I was looking for the things that have disintegrated over time, collected in corners seemingly lifeless piles that I might re-integrate into ink. The screen left over in the cracks after the dirty city snow melts and receded like a glacier. The steps up to the house made of concrete that has broken down and made a crack big enough for an ant to start tunnelling finding the sandy layer below and the little green thing that shares the bit of soil and then gets spraypainted with yellow survey paint for some future road construction. Together all these bits make a kind of spirit of the leftovers of a city. And pigments tend toward the grey and speckled and complicated. I found an alley near my house which I figured gets less cleaning than the streets and so seemed like the place to harvest the dustiest of street pigments. I found everything there except for the washing soda which I ordered online for making lakes and cherry gum binder which I harvested from a nearby tree over the winter. I did not care if the results were a bit murky but I wanted them to be real, to force me lower to really examine and reanimate what the city is sloughing off. My notes are below. I love the way it turned out. I hope the client does too. Maybe I will see you next week in New York picking up discarded flowers and bits of drywall in some Brooklyn alley somewhere.

—JL

Found Street Dust Components

• fine ant-excavated sand

• multicoloured alley scree

• storm drain rust water

• poppy pollen/pine pollen

• Dumpster-scratched rust

• crumbled concrete step

• high vis yellow survey marking paint (on a leaf)

• cigarette butts

• car window dust

• construction dust

Other additives

• cherry gum binder (dried, powdered, rehydrated)

• washing soda (Sodium carbonate) to precipitate the pigments

Techniques