LisaRuth Creates

…from the dye garden.

I am often asked if my plant dye art and experimentation includes ecoprinting, i.e. making flower prints on fabric. Until 2023 the answer has been no, not yet. It’s sort of like the questions I have been asked since I started weaving: Do you spin your own yarn? Do you dye your own fiber? Do you (insert any number of deepening of experience of working with fiber arts)? While the answer was always, no, not yet, I have done some beginning work learning spinning (of wool), and started dyeing with foraged plants in 2017. The dyeing has now supplanted weaving as my main fiber art. The point is that at some moment, techniques and curiosities seep in and start to become part of the practice.

So, I first tried the popular craft of ecoprinting with a test shirt I bought for use as a farm work shirt, and used fresh coreopsis blooms to make a print on the fabric. The pigment-rich coreopsis blooms make a good impression on these cotton and cotton/linen blend shirts, and I have continued to decorate a range of colors and some different styles.

[A note that I did not dye the shirts, they come to me pre-dyed.]

I call it the “FLORAL IMPRESSIONS from the dye garden” line, and the shirts are for sale. I have a small selection of sizes and colors in stock.  Please contact me if you are interested in what I have available.

The tags for my FLORAL IMPRESSIONS shirts are made from the cardboard slipped into the pockets when hammering the coreopsis blooms onto the fabric.

“Common Threads” project textile held up to light for a nice stained glass effect and to highlight the bojagi technique of hidden stitches

I am the Irish Consulate of San Francisco’s chosen artist to participate in a global project: “Common Threads” in celebration of St. Brigid’s Day 2023. See the gallery showcasing each piece and the artist who created it.

As an Irish-American using materials endemic to this place where I live, I am contributing a small part of a larger cloak or “brat” to be assembled from pieces coming from all over the world and to be exhibited in Dublin in February 2023. It will be the first time in history that Lá Fhéile Bhríde (Brigid’s Feast Day, the traditional pagan Imbolc, or beginning of spring) is observed as a public holiday, the first named after a woman. It’s an honor to contribute my many layered work to this worldwide project!

St. Brigid is both a goddess and a saint, and a patroness of many things, not only the Patroness of Ireland: poetry, learning, healing, protection, blacksmithing, livestock, and dairy production. St. Brigid’s cloak is often depicted as a patchwork of colors and materials, and is central to the story of how she founded her church and became Ireland’s patron saint. As the video for the project explains: “The myth of St. Brigid’s cloak explains how her first church was founded. Only given enough land that her cloak would cover, Brigid and her sisters pulled the four corners of her cloak and it miraculously expanded across many acres.”

The aim of “Common Threads” is 1) to promote and support textile work—a traditionally female industry and art form, 2) to symbolically honor the legend of St. Brigid’s cloak, and 3) to visually represent the reach of the Irish consular network.

As “Common Threads” aims to visually represent the reach of the Irish consular network, for my textile I chose to use a selection of dyed silk and cotton dyed with plants endemic to this place—San Francisco/Yelamu. My textile square is  made of plant-dyed silk (the backing is cotton) using California native plants as dyes. Over the years I have been using plants as dyes, I have often been asked: “What are you going to do with the fabric/yarn/textiles? Since 2017 the experiment of foraging or growing plants, using seeing what color they give as dyestuff, and having that result has been sufficient. But this idea has also always been in the back of my mind: to create patchworks of the various colors together. Celebrating St. Brigid and her legacy is a way I can situate myself as a woman textile artist and strongly in my Irish heritage. It has been a profound personal exploration to represent this place—San Francisco—which I have come to know deeply, while reconnecting to our family’s place of origin.

Here is the result of piecing together California native plant dyed silk and cotton into a bojagi (a traditional Korean wrapping cloth made by patchwork) square. I am most attracted to bold colors, but with this palette I love the muted hues of the yellows and pinks playing against each other, and set off by the dark brown.

The plants I used are:

California Sagebrush

Cypress

Manzanita

California Poppy

Ceanothus

California Wild Rose

Red Flowering Currant

Elderberry

Purple Sage

This is the story of the journey of a father-daughter collaboration to create an illustrated poetry book.

In 2009, my dad came to me with a collection of haiku he had written almost daily about the birds he observed in the backyard and along the river bank of my family home in Washington State. Together we have enjoyed sitting along the riverbank observing the bird activity, and over the years the bald eagle pair and their offspring in the cottonwood trees across the river have become part of the extended family I regularly hear about in our weekly phone calls. He asked if I would illustrate the birds in the poems and would I like to create a book out of it. I decided to use my preferred medium of paper collage to depict the birds. Using a torn paper mosaic style also had the effect of giving a “feathered” look to the birds.

At the time I was helping out a papermaker/book artist/printer with some of her book projects. I began to imagine typesetting the poems and printing the book by hand. Aside from the painstaking process of creating the birds, without any experience in bookmaking, it took quite a while to decide which format the book would take. Consultation with a couple of friends who are book and layout experts helped me get farther along. From the perspective I now have post-completion, I realize that making an artist book is a complex equation of trigonometry, geometry, and algebra combined, with serendipitous discovery along the way. Finding a hardbound book, A Net of Fireflies: An Anthology of 320 Japanese Haiku containing haiku paintings solidified the book’s form. The book was not bound using signatures, instead the folds are on the outside edge of the pages. Utilizing this format offered the convenience of concealing the relief from the typeset pages, as well as the possibility of adding another Japanese book form to complement the haiku: a stab bound spine.

I selected a smooth, off-white Mohawk paper from the incredible selection at FLAX Art & Design, which I cut down to print size and then later cut to half that size for binding. The setting of the type by hand—by me—and printing—by the paper mill—was done as a trade for my creation of a paper mosaic at the entry to the paper mill where the lead type, Kluge printing press, guillotine, and other tools were available to me. The paper mosaic features several types of paper made by the mill: from cotton rag and cat tails. The light blue—and a limited number of dark blue—cover papers of the book are made from denim and cotton rag, made in part by my friend Drew Cameron of Combat Paper Project. The silk thread used to bind the books was hand dyed by me with natural indigo, in vats I had access to as an artist/weaver in the Berkeley Art Museum show, “The Possible” in 2014.

I chose six birds from the 21 species my dad wrote verses about, reluctantly not illustrating a few favorites like the pileated woodpecker, mergansers, and the eagles. Because I wanted the birds to appear as close to life-sized as possible, these three birds were more complicated to imagine as part of the project. I started with the Washington State bird, the goldfinch. Definitely included were other bright birds like the western tanager and Steller’s jay. My father’s favorite, the mourning dove, had to be part of the mix. And a couple with detailed plumage like the northern flicker and cedar waxwing made the cut. A sketch based on photos sourced online became slowly filled in with color from saturated magazine pages. I worked from the bottom up, so the paper pieces would lay on top of each other as the feathers do on a bird. Each dot on the flicker’s white feathers were cut out individually. The original collages were reproduced on Hahnemühle rice paper as high quality digital prints by LightSource SF, whose staff really helped integrate the illustrations into the project beautifully.

Ultimately, all the pieces of the book came together in June 2018, nine years after my dad suggested the idea. There were several life projects that came in between me and finishing the collages and figuring out the complex math of putting the puzzle pieces together. The ultimate wrench in the works: being forced out of my home in 2013 by the wave of economic changes in San Francisco. I believe that if I hadn’t been looking for three years for a home starting that year, I would have completed the project several years ago. Now, cozily settled into a cottage perched on the slope of Bernal Heights, with all my supplies around me and space to create available, I have the ability to assemble and bind the edition.

The book, 28 Days in May: avian observations, by Len Elliott, and illustrated by me, LisaRuth Elliott, is an edition of 50. As of March 2019, 42 of these have been sold or given away. A percentage of the sales was presented as a donation to the Rainier Audubon Society in King County, Washington in January 2019.

As we were discussing the printing of the book in 2013, my dad sent this observation, a 29th poem to add to the collection here:
Curled around feeder,
Pileated woodpecker
Gobbling up suet.

as a showcase of my paper, textile, and book works, you’ll find collage and assemblage, weaving and other textile projects, hand bound and hand covered books (coming soon!), as well as murals i’ve assisted with or managed and work i’ve helped other artists with.

a global wanderer, i find beauty in the textures and patterns around me, and look to what is discarded on my journeys and along everyday paths for creative starting points, desiring to fashion beauty out of something that has been passed over.

STRIPES: Collages from The 100 Day Project October 3 – 16, 2015

in september 2012 i designed, co-led, and co-created a community mural making as part of a community land project at Yuba Libre in the sierra foothills.

the building we installed the mosaic on is a strawbale structure on a stone foundation. see Mosaic Making for more information on the project.