By Whitney Cole
I had the chance to come back home briefly this week and decided to try to continue where I’d left off with some of the “paintings” I’d been working on that used the natural colors from plants that grew on our land. Bailey came along for the ride, and my little sister met up with us while we mosied about.
I gathered some different plants from around the farm, including juniper, daisies, and trumpet vine (“cow itch”), as well as some pokeberries, which grow abundantly throughout the pastures. I brought the treasures home and began working on mixing the colors on paper, but I was mostly taken with the rich, beautiful consistency (and color) that the pokeberries created.
It was incredibly similar to the ink I use in my fountain pens, and could even be used with water to create washes. I even smashed some on my hands to try to create prints with skin, however, I later found out how truly toxic pokeberries were and how strongly recommended it is that you do not allow it to touch your skin. I spent the evening scrubbing my skin and preparing for the worst. I turned out okay the next morning, and even got to move on with the next step of the process: creating photograms! I’ve decided to take the paintings a step further and use their light-sensitive plant qualities to create new photographs with objects, or in the future negatives of old photographs. This allows me to use a product of the land to create the paintings, and then turn the paintings into photographs by exposing them to sunlight.
I found some objects and “negatives” from older projects to use as a test for this process. While the negative made no noticeable changes to the paper, the Ginko leaf certainly did, which is incredibly exciting and promising. The negative could have been more effective with the “wash” style ink, or could have esponded to more time. I wanted to try the process out with a medium other than the pokeberry plant, so I used some leftover produce I had in the kitchen with some more random objects from the apartment. I gave these images more time because of the time of day and the cloudy weather, but because I was too impatient (or I just waited too late in the day), I succeeded only in making a mess. That is just fine though, because now I’ve found a formula to work on and improve to make this particular branch of work, and Lou, who apparently likes tomatoes, got to lick the paper. 
In other news, the newer copy of the book is coming along (all except for the boards for the cover), and it is finally meeting both mine and Bailey’s expectations.
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Whitney Cole is a tiny Southern firecracker from small-town Virginia She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 with a B.F.A. in Photography. Her work to date has been an investigation of her Southern heritage. Follow her on Instagram for lots of pictures of her dog and trees.
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