Funneling

Inside Ink-making's surprisingly significant tool

All above images by Lauren Kolyn outtakes for Make Ink

You begin always with wide open places. Climb if you can to a high place where you can turn in a circle but loosely, almost without an idea or purpose, only attention of the most still, opening kind. Carry only a backpack full of ziplock bags and a notebook and your roaming eyes. Here the landscape is huge and complicated and complete, falling loose in front and all around you. And then the choosing begins: a narrowing of idea. Look out now in a particular place for a particular plant’s particular way of being itself. Bring it back to your smaller protected place. Separate berries from twigs, richer colours from dried up old pieces. Only the yellowest or the most almost-black purple petals from the flower or the juiciest berries or the reddest under-bark. Find the best bits. Reduce these. Boil up this chosen handful, all natural particles flying a whirlwind in the big old pot, only for inkmaking. Water and pigment dance here. A commingling. Slowly, slowly the clear water boils off and the richer colour thickens what’s left. And then another culling. Sieve the bits out. Only the smallest most integrated particles of colour are left now. The mixture is getting finer, but also smaller more intensified, more a oneness. There is a moving circular action but always downward, always compressing. A narrowing, a binding of water’s linked hydrogen and oxygen working with binders and pigments to become something crystaline and perfect. One liquid dark bundled line of ink. A big and wide outstretch arms and opened eye to the small, the purposeful, the place-infused, deep-coloured, possibility-saturated poem that is a single drop. Consider that all of this is a kind of funnelling.

Consider the funnel. A piece of molded plastic that costs 99 cents at IKEA and lives in the drawer with the measuring cups is, in its simple everydayness, barely noticed. The funnel deserves our attention. Our praise. And once it did. An iconic shape that does what its called. A funnel funnels. So practical and and obvious is the shape that it’s hard to picture the funnel as the magical invention for moving channelling fine stuffs from one container to another.

Maybe the first funnel was some leaf wrapped into that shape, or the hollow horn of some now extinct beast with a tiny hole at its pointy end. It’s a shape found in some of the oldest caves of China, where remnants of the world’s oldest beer recipe still cling to the insides of a funnel-like pottery device. Funnels have been dug up by archeologists all over the world and made of copper and steel, glass, ceramics, and horn. There is even a whole period of archeological European history called the funnel-beaker culture named for the perfect taper of their distinctive crockery. Following the funnel back to its roots, I see that it is a ritual tool. A machine of gravity, of slowed time, of bringing a flow together, down and down into ever smaller tunnelings. A tool of meaning-making, of investiture. A funnel is the shape that aches.

I made a visual essay for you on the funnel. A thing that is also a becoming. I found something in the pictures that was under my love of the funnel’s shape and spirit. Follow this downward spiral with me.

As always I hope that you will consider membership.