FLORA WALLACE
I begin by making an ink, I make ink from plants, berries, nuts, minerals and metals. I will go foraging and see what I can find, depending on the season or if I’m in a rural or an urban environment, there’ll be certain things I look out for. It's usually the ink making process that inspires a ceramic utensil, needing something very specific that doesn’t seem to exist.
“Each ingredient you use to make ink has an effect on the way it turns out which is the most exciting part of the process. So it is especially bound to the places where the ingredients were collected from. I’ve also become interested in working with the weather and have been experimenting with making ink from rain, ice and snow. I feel like this is one way I can collaborate with weather systems.”
The first ink utensil I made emerged out of a frustration with always spilling the ink while filtering it using a funnel. So I designed a funnel with four arms that can hold itself upright over a bowl. Then I made the bowl for it to fit perfectly over. These are my most used utensils. I feel that the making of the utensils and the making of the inks in some way mirror each other, as the tools are bound to the inks in the same way that the inks are bound to specific places.
One of the main ingredients in ink is water and, depending where you collect your water from and what minerals it contains, it will have a different PH which will have an overall effect on the colour of the ink. I collect my water from all sorts of sources including rivers, oceans, fountains, drippy pipes, muddy puddles etc.
Flora is a ceramic artist, ink maker and illustrator based in London and Dorset. She studied 3D Design and material practise at Brighton University.
