Ginkgo leaves, charred grapevines and secret clay deposits are just some of the materials repurposed by three local artists.

By Erika Tally, Grace Taylor, and Indi Rose, for the Community News Service

For three Vermont artists, nature not only inspires, it also serves as a resource. Whether it be soil from Middlebury, fallen leaves in Underhill or wild clay in Jericho, foraging is an integral part of these artists’ creative process. 

Seeing color everywhere

A couple of years ago, while driving in Winooski, Carolyn Sommer spotted a row of ginkgo trees. Intrigued by the tree’s distinctive fan-shaped leaves, she wondered how the foliage might look printed on clothing. 

Grabbing two spare bags from her trunk, Sommer asked her friend to help collect the fallen leaves. 

“I was so curious at the time,” she said. “I don’t have ginkgo trees on my property, so what am I going to get from those?”

As a natural dye artist, Sommer forages as an essential part of her process. Using fallen leaves, natural fiber textiles and plants from her dye garden, Sommer creates a variety of botanically dyed clothing. Coreopsis-printed bucket hats and onion skin-dyed tank tops are two items featured on her website.

Sommer believes that using these natural elements makes her more aware of her surroundings and grateful for what the earth provides.

“The land has everything that we need,” she said. “It can provide us food, medicine, even color, but so many of us just walk through our daily lives with blinders on.”

Growing up at the base of Mount Mansfield, where she still lives now, Sommer was instilled with a love for the environment. 

“I feel like it’s such an integral part of Vermont culture, that appreciation for nature, whether it’s outdoor recreation or more naturalist-type tendencies,” she said. 

This gratitude was only heightened during her time at the University of Vermont. For her capstone work as an environmental studies major, Sommer worked with local food systems and herbalists. 

“Foraging initially for me was, like, food and medicine, not dye,” she said. 

In 2020, Sommer began exploring plants through a new lens by using natural dyes. After lots of research and trial and error, Sommer used science to help her master a variety of dye techniques. One, called eco-printing, is a multi-step process that begins with deep cleaning of a piece of fabric, followed by the use of a mordant, a treatment that helps bind the dye to the fiber. Sommer uses aluminum acetate, a chemical salt that is commonly used as a topical astringent.  

“The more you learn about the chemistry of natural dyes, the easier it is to understand what pigment it’ll produce,” she said.

After the cloth is prepped, Sommer arranges the foraged plant material on it. She then wraps it around a copper pipe and steams the bundle. Once the process is complete, Sommer peels back the leaves, revealing a mirror image of the foliage on the fabric. 

With this technique, Sommer creates an assortment of ethereal products. A sleeveless top adorned with black walnut leaves, marigolds and indigo borders combines eco-printing with dip dyeing. A flowing white tunic is also embellished with black walnut eco-print. 

Along with foraging, Sommer grows her own plants for dyeing and supplements her projects with other natural dyes to ensure she has enough pigment. She said she likes to use leaves or flowers that showcase the beauty of nature’s imperfections. 

“If there’s a hole in a leaf from a caterpillar chomping on it, you’ll see that in the print, which I think is really cool,” Sommer said. 

Sommer said she forages to feel grounded in the present while looking to the future. In the summer, she can play around with flowers, knowing that in a couple of months, her process will look different. In the winter, she tends to use more leaves and a tie-dye-like technique. 

No matter the season, Sommer is often armed with a spare bag to collect leaves. 

“I always regret it if I don’t. I’m so curious about how things will print or what kind of experiments I can do with them,” she said. 

What began as a COVID-era hobby has blossomed into a business: Colors of Sommer. Under that banner, Sommer sells her garments at various local fairs and on her website. Many of Sommer’s customers are already knowledgeable about natural dyes, but for others, Colors of Sommer is their introduction to the process. 

“I get to be the one to teach them or expose them to this side of things,” she said. 

After six years of doing this work, Sommer is still curious, often doing experiments with plants in her backyard. 

“You kind of start to see color everywhere, or you wonder what color you’re gonna get,” she said.

– Grace Taylor

Returning to an old artform  

After years of searching, Britton Blanchard was walking along a riverbed when he saw a deep blue patch of the sediment in the dirt. He reached down and scooped it out of the earth. It was smooth like butter: He had finally found the perfect wild clay. 

Blanchard is a Burlington-based ceramic artist and studio manager who incorporates Vermont’s naturally-occurring clay bodies and pigments into his pottery. While most modern ceramicists use commercially processed clay, Blanchard is attracted to the natural element of the craft and goes into the Vermont wilderness to find his own. 

Because ceramics are made from naturally occurring materials that can endure for millennia, Blanchard sees his work as contributing to a long history of artifacts.

“It’s one of the oldest art forms to humankind,” Blanchard said. “I mean, even the cave paintings that people usually made were out of clay and ochre.”

Blanchard grew up in Pawlet and fell in love with clay as a high schooler. He moved north to attend the University of Vermont, where he studied studio art. 

“After my first wheel throwing class, I was addicted,” Blanchard said. 

He is now the manager of UVM’s School of the Arts Ceramic Co-op, where he sells his own pieces on the side, decorating his pots with Vermont’s wild, unprocessed clay.

Clay is a naturally-occurring material made from small rock particles that erode over tens of thousands of years, traveling down mountains and settling in riverbeds and mixing into a homogeneous material. Ceramicists can shape clay on a wheel or by hand, creating sculptures, functional pieces or both. Vermont’s clay is “low-fire,” meaning it can’t withstand the same high heat as other types of clay, so its uses are limited.

In centuries past, people foraged their clay. Most modern ceramicists, however, use factory-made clay and decorating materials purchased from large-scale producers.  

Blanchard was introduced to wild clay by a UVM professor. He subsequently spent years trying to figure out how to incorporate it into his work. 

“Clay comes from the ground. It’s 100,000 years old, just sitting there waiting for us to use it,” Blanchard said. 

Vermont has clay deposits scattered throughout the state, most of which formed after the last ice age, when glacial lakes receded and left behind soil and sediment. The earliest record of humans using clay has been traced back to at least 28,000 BCE, according to the American Ceramic Society. 

“We still find these small little figurines from humans 30 (or) 40,000 years ago. That’s just so cool,” Blanchard said.

Ten years after originally finding it, Blanchard still uses clay from his secret deposit located miles off a trail in Jericho. He brings 60-liter bags and shovels to collect the creamy soil from the ground. 

Back in the studio, Blanchard mixes the clay with water, filters it through various sieves and dips brushes into it to paints mugs, bowls and plates with the mixture, called slip.

Blanchard mixes other natural materials into his glaze recipes. He uses wood ash from his parents’ wood stove, charcoal and ochre — an iron-rich clay form that adds yellow-red hues to glazes. 

“Once you make pots with natural materials, there is a connection between the work and the environment,” he said. “It’s a symbiosis that just feels right.” 

Blanchard sells his work on Etsy, in South Burlington’s Vermont Gift Barn and at a store in Morrisville called Vermont Creative. He also shares his homemade decorating glazes with students in UVM’s Ceramic Co-Op.

Even though foraging for clay is becoming a lost art, Blanchard is continuing the history of thousands of potters that came before him, and preceding more to come.

– Indi Rose

A  ‘place-based’ approach 

Mud, buckthorn berry, goldenrod and black petunia are not materials found in most artists’ studios, yet for Middlebury-based painter Mira Cabrera, they are essential supplies.  

Cabrera uses pigments made from natural elements she forages herself to create place-based art intended to strengthen the connection between people and nature.

Cabrera, who describes herself as “obsessed with color,” wasn’t always a painter. She got her start working with color as a textile dyer and studied design at Cornell University before relocating to teach in the theater department at Middlebury College.

Working closely with dyes inspired an interest in using natural elements, like plants and flowers, to make her own unique colors. Cabrera started using these homemade pigments to make dyes and paints. 

“You start figuring out how you can turn these things into colors and jarring them up, and it’s intoxicating,” she said. 

Cabrera’s desire to work outside — instead of a dark theater — also motivated her to begin collecting her own pigments. In 2023, she opened her studio, Growing in Process, where she sells her paintings. 

Since then, Cabrera has produced dozens of paintings, including those in her first series, “Mud Season,” which uses pigments made from the soil of an uprooted tree. The cool blue and brown tones of the abstract watercolor paintings are meant to emphasize the overlooked beauty of the transitional period between the bright winter and green spring, Cabrera says. 

Incorporating natural materials into her art has been a learning process, but one Cabrera says has been invaluable to developing her artistic style. Cabrera says that natural elements are forgiving of mistakes, and they allow her art to be guided by her own curiosity.

“The thing that keeps me hooked on them is there’s always more to learn, and there’s always a new or developing relationship that you can have with a material or with a place,” Cabrera said.

Cabrera says she has a “place-based” approach to her work and focuses on making each painting with items collected from a specific area, like a single trail system or a farm. 

In the past, she has partnered with businesses, such as Lincoln Peak Vineyard in New Haven, to create a custom series of paintings using natural elements foraged on their property. 

“I’ll go to these different locations and spend time understanding the colors, looking around the environment. I do a lot of color swatches with traditional paint materials as well, and then I will incorporate what I find there,” she said.  

At Lincoln Peak Vineyard, she used grapevines to make charcoal for drawing and crushed it to make a pigment for paint. She used the grape skin to create ink and made other pigments from dogwood trees and wildflowers. The resulting pieces blend the colors of the scene to abstractly depict the landscape, stripped down to just vague forms of trees and grape-shaped blotches of deep purple ink. 

While her materials might not last as long as museum-grade paints, the temporary aspect is part of the appeal. Cabrera says her use of natural pigments is part of a trend she’s seeing in the art world toward experimentation with new materials and mediums. 

“We’ve had paints created in a chemistry lab long enough at this point; that’s not as interesting to us anymore. What is interesting is this idea of experience and care,” she said. 

Cabrera says she aims to inspire a dialogue with her materials, challenging long-held beliefs about the importance of using archival materials, which are designed to last a lifetime. 

“What if we actually engage in what that brings to the artwork, and that ephemerality, and how that makes the art even more special or connected to whatever the place is?” she said. 

– Erika Tally

Disclosure: Reporter Indi Rose is a member of UVM’s Ceramic Co-op.