Lets_Make_Colour: an expression of place, of soil, water, plant life, climate + time. To forage for colour is to engage these conditions materially; locating the act of making within the living systems from which its materials emerge. Colour is alive. Colour is light. Colour is life.
Working with botanical and geological matter draws upon an embodied remembering of landscape, cultivated through observation, repetition and direct encounter. This remembering is developed in situ. It is seasonal and relational; held in the body, transmitted through practice and inseparable from the conditions of place. Colour becomes a means of remembering an ecology through its materials, their transformations and their interdependencies. It becomes a means of remembering our ancestors and their own experience with colour. It has the potential to become a means of remembering the self.
Against a contemporary culture of extraction and disposability, foraging proclaims a different relationship between making and the living world. We remember the ecological origins of pigment, exposing the dependencies obscured by industrial colour production and the fictional story of limitless availability.
Foraging is an act of care and a refusal of extractive logic. Care attunes us to ecological limits, to what can be taken and what must remain, to the act of regeneration and the lives sustained by a particular place and the decisions we make through our human lens. Refusal lies in rejecting the assumption that landscapes exist for human use only or that making colour can be separated from the consequences of its production. Within social and ecological crisis, foraging for colour is not a romantic return to an imagined pristine nature, but more, a remembering of our existence within ecological life and the implications we have as humans and, for those looking to find a path to refusal, a quiet material political stance.
Foraging for colour establishes making as a relationship of interdependence from the systems that were imagined through an incomprehensible lense. It is a revival. Of ancestral skills once embodied. And of quiet rebellion. Making colour insists that materials have origins, that landscapes have limits and that creative practice carries obligations beyond the final outcome and to connect with colour as our ancestors once did.
Alive Colour becomes an opportunity to remember where we are, who we are and what we stand for.
ABOUT
Carly Franklyn lives on the unceded lands of the Gumbaynggirr people of the Yurruungga Nation, now known Bellingen in NSW, and has a background in strategic communications and cultural development.
Through her practice, @lets_make_colour, Carly explores the ways we make meaning and experience connection across our ecological, cultural and inner landscapes. Her work is an ongoing enquiry into how we come to know a place, and how the simple acts of gathering, making and noticing invite us to remember that we are not separate from the living world, but deeply entangled within it’s threads of life.
Carly is open to collaboration, demonstration and talks and can be contacted at carlyfranklyn@gmail.com for enquiries,
