Soil To Palette: Plant-Based Ink With Anne Yoncha

FREE! Email nicolle@missoulaartmuseum.org to register!

Join visiting artist-scientist Anne Yoncha to learn how to make your own pigments from natural materials. Bring your own plant matter: dried or green will work. Watch the tannic acid within it react to iron salt / ferrous sulfate to produce a series of rich brown inks which will oxidize and darken over time. This is a process based on iron gall ink which you can use to make a place-based palette. Would you like to make soil-based watercolor paint too? Bring a small amount of soil/earth as well as your plant materials.

Don't miss Yoncha's lecture: "Second Nature: an art-science exploration of our posthuman landscapes." Monday, Oct. 23, 7 to 8 PM at ZACC.

Yoncha's visited is hosted by the University of Montana Wilderness Institute and the School of Visual and Media Arts, with support from the Jim and Jane Dew Visiting Artist Fund.

Anne Yoncha is currently Assistant Professor of Art + Painting Area Coordinator at Metropolitan State University Denver. She was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware and earned her MFA at the University of Montana in 2019. She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, working with restorationists to make collaborative art-science work about former peat extraction sites outside Oulu. Her practice combines digital sensing technology, such as bio-data sonification, and analog, traditional processes including painting with ink she makes from locally-sourced plant matter. Her ongoing research with the HAB (High Altitude Bioprospecting) working group began in Fall 2019 at Field_Notes, a residency of Finland’s Bio Art Society at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in subarctic Lapland, where she worked with artists, biologists, and programmers to detect high-altitude microbes using a heli-kite. Outside the studio she can often be found doing another kind of environmental “research” via bicycle.