Hawaiian Sandalwood Ink

A Complicated Message in a Bottle

I wanted my fate to be human. 

Like a perfume 
that does not choose the direction it travels, 
that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.

—Jane Hirshfield 

from "Like two Negative Numbers multiplied by Rain" The Beauty: Poems

I wanted to write you a simple note about the ink that I made on the island on the tree farm and brought home with me to test out on paper. I wanted to show you how local colour can be made into a kind of bottled landscape. And I kept it simple by making only one ink there. My 2 oz dropper bottle did, at first, seem like a perfect encapsulation of time and place. But then I started to wonder. And look closer. And things got a little murkier.

It started out beautifully. Coming up the cinder-red mud driveway past the gate, the orange tree blossoms, and the gardenia, and all the other green jungle scents hit you through the fine mist. Like I was saying last week, I have been immersed in sensations that are beyond words or pictures. But if I could get all five senses compressed into a little glass bottle, I thought I might hold onto the moment, take it home, and let the liquid memory pool on paper. And share it with you.

When I collect materials in some faraway place I usually make ink on site so that I don’t have to worry about getting stopped at the border. I find when you put ink in a dropper bottle and describe it to a border guards as a hand-made art supply they tend to glaze over and usher you along quickly —out of fear, I imagine, of having to hear anything more about my art practice. When I collect materials in some faraway place I also sometimes feel a bit sheepish, like I am a colonial tourist or at least an interloper looking for pretty colours to harvest and bring back home and kind of breaking my rule to focus on the ground around me as a hyper-local ink maker. But I’d been doing my research and working with all kinds of ingredients on this rainy, gulchy land for years and I couldn’t resist the idea of