action four

Nature’s offerings.

Step out and look wider – Generation

“Ecologically Literate” was the word I’ve chosen for my Action 3, in which the experience of nature was put into focus. How could I translate nature to a material I had at home? How could the picture of wilderness become more clear in my imagination by using more than just one of my senses?

For this Action, I went out. I went to the woods. I went to the park. I went to those places where I felt like I am experiencing nature on my own. I first started off by collecting everything I could find and what I found was interesting – either the way it looked, the way it smelled or the way it felt in my hand.

I found blackberry bushes whose fruits somehow dried out, leaving some early stage blackberries behind. I found acorns and their loose “hats”, which looked super interesting and when looking closer, were in a way so perfectly shaped to my surprise. I found pinecones, reminding me of being a child, when using them with my brothers to attack each other by throwing them on one another. And I found chestnuts and horse chestnuts – this is the time of the year when everybody would look for them in the forests. They are all over the place over here.

Walking through the forests reminded me of my childhood, traditions and even stories my grandma would tell me. How she would look for certain plants and certain leaves during war, because those would be used as tea or medicin when they didn’t have anything else. She still knows everything about any local plant in the forest, because it was crucial to know them – they were dependent on nature. The big difference to us today is: her generation was also aware of it!

I feel like we are loosing this knowledge from generation to generation. My grandma might not know as much as her parents did. My parents might not know as much as my grandparents do, and I certainly don’t know all of what my parents know about nature. Will next generations even know why nature is important in the first place?

I wanted to test, if I can learn something from nature without someone else telling me what is possible. An experiment of getting to know nature AGAIN(?!) by experimenting.

I cut the chestnuts in half and looked at the different components. I decided to cook the chestnuts. When cooked I could at some point take off the shell and decided to continue only boiling the shell. Probably I would get some kind of color.

It turned out pretty interesting. It was a bit harder than I thought to peel off the shell but it worked. The inner component of the chestnut started to turn into some kind of bubbly soap while in the hot water. Definitely something I want to look into at some point as well! When boiling the shells a super nice color developed. I used it to dye fabric, wool and cotton threads.

They all turned out so different. The wool turned out intensively brown, the cotton thread and fabric would turn light brown.

And so my dad came into the kitchen and as he is a passionate chemist I must have been triggering his inner explorer with my “primitive experiments”. A conversation about colors, plants and textiles developed and he explained to me why certain colors and materials would work differently – besides he was quite impressed by the chestnut color. It will definitely not be long lasting he mentioned, but he didn’t expect such a strong color at all. He gave me some basic chemicals to experiment with, such as soda, copper or iron solution to see how the PH-value and other components would have an impact on the color. So the action turned out to be more “scientific” than intended. It was fun!

It was super interesting to start with something I found appealing on the forest ground, to experiment with no clue and then in the end to experiment in a more scientific way. I later on used the fabric and threads to try embroidering with it. It was fun thinking about how all the shades were achieved with chestnuts. One product from nature resulting in so many different versions.