Fall Artist Feature: India Flint
India Flint is a multimedia artist, writer and educator based in South Australia, working in ecologically sustainable contact print processes using plants and found objects. Flint’s artistic process includes methods such as walking, drawing, assemblage and stitching, which come together to create rich, layered works that reflect and record the beauty of the artist’s surroundings in Peramangk country and travels.
Self-described “botanical alchemist, forest wanderer & tumbleweed, stargazer & stitcher, string twiner, working traveller, dreamer, writer and the original discoverer of the eucalyptus eco-print,” India Flint’s body of work is sure to inspire the wanderer in all of us. You can view Flint’s full sketchbook on the digital library.
Flint offers workshops in botanical alchemy, ecologically sustainable textile practices, aleatory poetry and rebel stitching which can be found at The School of Nomad Arts.
Standing in ‘lifeboat’ installed on farm October 2020
Tell us about yourself!
I am the child of two people who were displaced by the 1939-45 war, and my DNA is European (with a smattering of Kazakh) despite being born in Australia. The Latvian part of it apparently dates back 40,000 years so I guess that makes me indigenous to that beautiful country.
It surprises me that for some 26 years I have lived on a farm in rural South Australia, the driest state on the driest continent. It was never my plan, just something that happened. I am very grateful though, as it has been a quiet haven where I could pursue my research in plant dyes, create land-based sculpture, grow vegetables and write several books.
I began seriously investigating eucalyptus dyes in 1999 and was awarded an MA in 2001. My book Eco Colour was published in 2008, followed by Second Skin in 2011. I’ve had a lifelong interest in plants and worked in several nurseries (over a period of about seven years) when I was a young student.
What mediums do you work in? How has your work evolved over the years?
Much of my early work was created around the human body, from costumes for dance to (for a time) supplying a high-end boutique in Hollywood with one-off, hand sewn creations. My practice conflates the visual and written poetics of place and memory. I use ecologically sustainable contact print processes from plants and found objects together with walking, drawing, assemblage, mending, stitch and text as a means of mapping country, recoding and recording my responses to landscape - working with cloth, paper, stone, windfall biological material, water, minerals, bones, the discarded artifacts and hard detritus of human inhabitation, the local weed burden. The work of each day, philosophically rooted in topophilia [the love of place] literally begins with a walk in the place where I live, on Peramangk country on the eastern shoulders of the Mount Lofty Ranges in South Australia.
When did you participate in the Sketchbook Project? What was the inspiration and process behind your book, A Walk in the Woods?
It was in 2012, I think. I had around that time been able to return to a place that shaped me in childhood (at the Mount Samuel end of Lake Morey, Vermont) for the first time since living there in 1969 and had been reminded how much I missed running wild in the brilliantly coloured woods of fall, so very different to the scruffy grey-green eucalyptus forests of Australia (though they have their own particular beauty.
How does the act of walking or wandering fit into and inform your artistic process?
Walking and the gentle rhythm of placing one foot before the other gives me space to think, and allows ideas to drift in. I carry a notebook and pencil in one pocket, a bag for collecting leaves in another. While I have infinite choices here on the farm, I could walk the same path every day (and sometimes do over a period of time) and see it each time with new eyes.
India Flint walking in the eucalyptus forest
Photo :: Haley Renee Photography
What is the importance of ecological sustainability in your work and process?
Working with natural materials there are a number of issues to take into account. I don’t take leaves from one region to another because they may well be carrying biohazards. If harvesting earth-colours there may be first nation protocols to consider.
I will not use toxic mordants when making dyes, and prefer by and large simply to let the leaves I am using write their own story on the work. When working with textiles I will seek out ethical sources for new materials and endlessly comb thrift stores for used clothing from which I can harvest cloth.
Can you describe your work’s relationship to place and memory?
Given my preference is to work with materials found ‘in place’, I feel that each piece carries in it the essence of the place(s) in which it was conceived and made. Stitching on cloth while I travel, words sometimes enter the work alongside local colour. Adding layers to the work gives it a palimpsest-like quality, especially when old pieces are revisited and reworked, particularly the paperworks and textiles.
What advice would you give an artist who wants to experiment with eco-prints or dyeing for the first time?
Start in your garden, if you have one. Learn the names of the plants that surround you, read about their qualities , research whether they are rare, or protected or poisonous before you dive in. And familiarise yourself with local law about wild gathering (illegal in Australia) before wandering out to harvest.
What are your favorite materials to work with?
While I have spent the last thirty years mostly focussed on textiles (particularly wool, in the company of eucalyptus), I have worked with paper and books alongside. Paper seems to be gradually taking over these days and I’m leaning more and more into the poetics of abstraction, through collaging it with cloth and working into it with paints made from plants and minerals.
Can you tell us about the School of Nomad Arts?
I resisted teaching online for ever so long, and felt it was almost a kind of prostitution, which is ridiculous, really. A persistent friend pushed and pushed me to dip my toes in the water a couple of years ago and the first attempt (a free class on Facebook) proved so popular that I dived in. The School of Nomad Arts gives me the chance to connect with students without having to endure the confines of an aeroplane, and many “real-life” students have come to view it as a kind of village well, around which we are all sailing in our armchairs. A mixed but (I think) charming metaphor.
My latest class there ‘the journeywoman’s second skin’ has been developed in collaboration with Maiwa (a clothing company and textile school based in Vancouver, BC) and offers students lots of options to explore in personalising a lovely series of “blank” clothing that they have had made. I went to India with Charllotte Kwon earlier this year, to choose the fabrics and work with pattern blocks from their archive together with my sketched ideas for the clothes. It was such a joy to meet the spinners and weavers of the beautiful textiles, and to know that they are being properly recompensed for their labour. I learned that it can literally take a village to make a piece of cloth!
How can people support your work?
I’d be delighted for folk to sign up to the school, especially as I won’t be able to teach in-person workshops for the next few years. Our government has informed us that we are confined to this island until 2023 and while I comprehend the risks associated with travel in the current situation it also gives me an inkling of understanding of how my relatives in Latvia would have felt during the years of soviet occupation :: though of course I am living a quite comfortable life without the privations they endured.
And if there’s a publisher out there reading this…I’m putting together a book about eucalyptus dyes, and would very much like to work with somebody who would be interested in helping me make it a truly beautiful object!