Calabash, bucket, sling, shrimp trap.

In Autumn 2017 I had an exhibition at Shirley Sherwood gallery of some early work I made during my residency at Kew, and we were able to show objects from Spruce’s collection in the gallery. It was a wonderful opportunity to let them be seen and discussed, and as part of this I gave talks in the gallery and spoke about some of the objects we had selected to display. One of the pieces, a calabash which had a handle fitted, was held wrapped by two crossed lengths of curauá (Ananas lucidus Mill.) which Spruce referred to as a water carrier or bucket.

EBC 46534 Calabash water bucket with detailhttps://ecbot.science.kew.org/read_ecbot.php?catno=46534&search_term=46534&search_type=name

One of the guests in the tour said to me, ‘for such an everyday object, why has it been made to be so beautiful, perhaps there is another use for it?’ I thought it was interesting point that everyday should equate to more mundane for her. That the time given over to making such a piece didn’t merit its use as a water carrier. I thought of Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Book of Fiction and that line, ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ [1] What else would be better than to be a carrier?

I have always loved this particular wrapped calabash but never have I known exactly what to do about it. I have drawn it several times but never understood how to capture its glowing shell-like surface. I made a piece of ceramic in unfired porcelain, that held the same shape. Just recently I thought I would start to try to weave a section of the length that wraps around it and see where that takes me.

I started to make cordage from the dry piles of tucum (Astrocaryum sp.) I brought back from NW Amazonia. As a note on this substitution, curauá is from the Family Bromeliaceae and looks like a pineapple, and is a species commonly found Venezuela,French Guiana, Peru and Brazilian Amazon, and tucum is a palm tree native to Brazil; found in capoeiras and terra firma forest.[2] However they are commonly substituted for each other, and in several objects in Spruce’s notes he says either one or the other is used but isn’t specific about which. I am using tucum as it’s what I have available.

At first I took small bundles and weaving into a cord but it was a bit too thick. I stopped and started a new one, and the cord was a bit neater and took a bit more concentration to keep the thickness even. But then I noticed all these objects around me here (a fan, a bag of carajuru, a bracelet I made with Francy) where tucum is used to bind things, and I saw that I had to make the lengths even thinner. And what I noticed when I started to do that was it became far easier and took less concentration, I no longer needed to focus on my hands or the material but instead could do it while doing other things, as my mother might do while she knits. While I am listening to lectures, or talking to people online, all the while I can be making lengths of this cordage to be woven into lengths for that calabash water carrier.

Small bundle of tucum cordage, and unwoven fibres
Three stages of cordage.

This in turn made me think of the categories that we can organise material objects by.
By use: water carrier, domestic tool, or fisherman’s water bottle.
By plant: calabash (Crescentia cujete) tucum (Astrocaryum sp.) curauá (Ananas lucidus Mill.)
How about by time? Could there be a category of material that gets made while other things are happening? Do these things therefore take on some of the quality of a child sitting outside a door listening in on a conversation, absorbing and ready to become something else? Can distinctions be made between full attention things to half attention things? Actually, by making this cordage I notice I am much more focused on the other task at hand, the listening or talking or even reading task. So maybe it should be called the thing to give attention.

I asked Erick if he had seen this pattern woven before, and he immediately said yes, it’s called puçá-stitch, and something very similar is used in making traps used for shrimps. He drew a picture and said he had a video somewhere he could find to show me how to do it. So there starts to become some connections between water, holding, containing and now I feel I have more a way to work with this material. Working towards one idea initially, but now with ideas around water, time, and containment in that place.  


[1] Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Terra Ignota, 2019

[2] Martins, Luciana. 2021. A Maloca Entre Artefatos e Plantas: Guia Da Coleção Rio Negro de Richard Spruca Em Londres. São Paulo, SP: ISA.

Dyeing with carajuru

I decided to finally use the dried leaves of carajuru that I brought back from Rio de Janeiro, to make watercolour (more on that separately) and also dye some skeins of cotton. I made some small tests in summer last year so worked on a larger batch in December. To prepare the cloth I used soy beans as a mordant. A rather laborious process of soaking the beans, making milk, double soaking the skeins in the milk and then letting them dry for a minimum of a week. I used to share a studio with an artist, Narelle Dore who worked with a lot of natural plant pigments, and so I trusted this painstaking process of using plant-based elements rather than metallic salts in the dying process.

I used almost all the dried leaves I had left to make a dye bath. Again I left it some days for the colour to develop, and once the cotton was submerged left it again. The resulting colour is delicate, but very underwhelming. I’m not surprised at all, as the tests I started in Rio showed me that the leaves need other elements added to obtain the brightest colours. I was able to make a lake pigment previously (separating pigment inside the dye bath) but now I needed a dye which would adhere to cotton, and though the colour looked strong in the dye bath it seemed to wash away each time.

Skeins drying after dye bath

I’m not overly concerned with this – the dyeing process doesn’t fascinate me or rather I’m not committed to reaching a specific colour for aesthetic reasons. I’ve gone far enough and for now I will keep overdyeing the fabric and try and build up some strength of hue.

The thing I am compelled by is an object I want to make. Some time ago I collected old, decaying pieces of Opuntia (prickly pear). They have an amazing lattice network inside that remains when the flesh has gone. This lattice structure apparently allows for greater water retention by the plant.[1] These grey/brown cactus skeletons are arranged in layers that can be peeled apart and they look entirely aquatic, like some kind of coral. This holding of space fascinates me, and I have been thinking of ways to articulate the passing of substance (air, water, juices, energy) through the various tubes, sieves and baskets in Northwest Amazonia. I like the combination of the watery red carajuru (associated with first baths after childbirth, first menstruation, and first ancestral voyage from the Milk River) and I want to peel apart these layers and then sew in tufts of the cotton dyed with the carajuru.

One of the Opuntia ‘layers’ ready to weave into

Like all of these intentions in making I set out to do one thing and another often comes out instead, so I will hold it as a light idea in my head and keep working with that of dripping, bubbling, patient waiting cotton until I find the colour that feels ready to sew and weave with.


[1] Ortega, Arturo & Victoria Uribe, Ricardo & Delgado-Hernandez, David & Cobos, Sandra & Rubio Toledo, Miguel & Rivera Gutiérrez, Erika & Higuera Zimbrón, Alejandro. (2013). Biomimicry: Natural Systems In Situ Analysis, Aimed to Rain Water Harvesting. Key Engineering Materials.

Drawing the object itself

Last term before Christmas I did a lot of teaching, too much really, and part of this was the design of a new course called The Artist’s Eye: Drawing from Natural History. It takes so much time to work through these sessions, and it was a large group of students. Each day had a different theme such as drawing fossils, marine invertebrate, insects, funghi etc. The funghi session was a favourite. Beginning with the work of Beatrix Potter we moved onto the drawings of amazing mycologists like M.F Lewis, who worked across England and Wales for forty-two years, filling three volumes with watercolours titled a Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods (1860–1902), or Minakata Kumagusu, (drawings shown below) a of researcher of slime moulds and cryptogamous plants, also known for work in anthropology and folklore studies

One student in this course was a kind of benevolent naysayer, as in, she was dissatisfied by either the course or her own work and had a habit of calling out whatever she didn’t like. On one particular day after asking students to draw an object in front of them, she said, “I really don’t get what it is we’re supposed to be doing here”. I replied something along the lines of it being about drawing the plant/mushroom to learn through observation. See how long the stem of the weed that stretches towards the light or how tight the gills of the mushroom are before they open up and spread out, or how the light falls on a smooth rock? Something like that. ‘Oh, okay’ she said, ‘so it’s just about drawing the thing, but is that all? Isn’t that just copying?’

Mushrooms ready for drawing during class.

I was frustrated but also couldn’t get the thought out my head. These comments are so helpful in identifying areas to build on and this just kept niggling at me. Yes of course it’s copying, but not to arrive at the same thing! To arrive somewhere else. Anthropologist Michael Taussig, talking about drawing in fieldwork notebooks says the ‘struggle [is] worth it because I looked at colour and I looked at the night and the river like I never had before and saw what I take so for granted with new eyes. Is there any activity that so rewards failure? These are toads that become flowers’.[1]

Drawing made as instructional tool during workshop in Tiquié, 2024

Or flowers, once drawn, become something else – teachers bringing new ideas. I have the notion this year is that among the artists I have been working with in London that a lot have been preoccupied with learning self-portraits, imagination, and narrative drawing told through the lens of their own identities. I understand in a way that for that one student drawing a mushroom wasn’t enough. I tried to think this through in the context of the drawing workshops in Tiquié last year. I have the notion that the Indigenous artists were more engaged with observational drawing, and there was also less of a divide between drawing from observation and drawing from imagination – the pictures inhabited the same world. I was able to help someone improve a drawing of a fruit on the table in front of them through amending the outline of helping to match the colour in paint, but I struggled to improve the drawing of the vessel someone was drawing from their imagination, and they didn’t seem sure why I couldn’t do that in the same way.

This is a huge generalisation at this stage and I can’t draw any conclusions from that short drawing workshop, but it could be something to think about in the future. Can I use is that it to actually ask, what is it that happens when you draw the object that sits in front of you?


[1] Taussig, Michael T. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Shield, Circle

I drew Spruce’s shield from the collection of the British Museum (Am.2129) in early 2020. The shield is 60cm in diameter, and the drawing is close to 1:1 scale. Spruce collected 2 shields, and while the weaving in the one in Kew’s collection (EBC 67762) is in overall good condition, the British Museum’s shield has breakages around the rim and in the centre (Figure 1). This was helpful when I started to draw as it allowed me to see where joins existed, how different sections started and finished, and to see ‘inside’ areas. This kind of ‘paying attention’ to every part of an outward surface has always been important in my practice, a way of knowing something intimately.

Figure 1. Shields collected by Richard Spruce at British Museum. Am.2129 (left) and the Economic Botany Collection. EBC67762 (right)

The British Museum storeroom is in Haggerston, behind the canal in a faceless building that a friend’s teenage daughter once scaled in the small hours and got in far more trouble that the climb was worth. The days I work there have to be booked weeks or months ahead, and on my designated drawing day, I arrive early and carefully position the shield with the collection manager Cynthia, and worked like this over several days. Two brushes, one pan of watercolour, I liked working from that angle I chose, tilted as if looking down at the surface but seeing the peak rising at the centre. Sometimes I worked methodically following a single strand of vine, and sometime moving in and out from the centre, tightening and adding detail to certain lines. I have found that when drawing from woven objects the line of the brush or pen very often follows the order of weaving, even if this is something I learn later.

It always seemed to be winter when I was drawing and I remember perpetually cold hands. It’s particular to draw in a room like there where every action and movement is controlled, and stepping outside to have a drink or a break is a waste of the time. Only when Cynthia asked for her lunch would I stop and go to the Turkish café to eat quickly, aware the light after lunch would go dim quickly.

One day from a different level of the building the sound of a conch could be heard – almost felt through your stomach rather than in the ears. I’m not sure the British Museum ever encourage or allow the playing of instruments, so was it one visitor inspired or overstepping? Cynthia leapt up, but she couldn’t leave me working alone so we were trapped for a moment with her feet either side of the door, “get ready to move!”, with the panic of a fire alarm, and then it became clear the problem was being addressed. I love these moments where the spell of stillness is broken.

In the end, this drawing (shown in Figure 2) never worked. It never came to life in the way that some do. It definitely didn’t ‘radiate’ in the way the shield does. I suspected it was to do with the angle I had chosen – not quite a fill circle – appropriate for a still life or an object on a museum shelf but not for something of this importance. Had I reduced it by drawing it in this way when it should have been worn? I thought for a long time about other circles. Giotto’s circle (that line of greatness), Śiva as the Lord of Dance, Atlas holding up the heavens, the ensō sign expressing enlightenment, emptiness, freedom, Korean moon jars- two hemispherical halves that are thrown separately and then joined in the middle with their imperfection symmetry of asymmetry. But these are not all equal notions – Giotto’s circle and ensō are drawn lines, moon jars and atlas’s world is a globe, and the shield is, well what? A spinning disc, a breast, a placenta, a layer of the world?

Figure 2. Shield, watercolour on paper, 2020 (detail)

I realised I had to go back and draw the shield again to find that of thrumming mark on the page that cuts through like the sound of the conch. I started a new version from the shield in Kew’s collection next, pencilling in lines so to see it from above. That was early in March 2020, before the city locked all doors and it was many months before I could return, and by that time with my baby and I didn’t have the time to continue the new drawing. However, I started thinking about it again earlier this year. During fieldwork in March I was talking to Oscarina about her ceramics, and there was a small group of men around us, some anthropologists and some not. The conversation was in Desana, Tuyuka, Portuguese, and English, and I was feeling frustrated as the questions I was asking Oscarina were being ‘clarified’ by others, turning into questions of kinship. I wanted to cut through and address her practice, and either waylay the conversation or bore the others so they would stop joining in. So thinking back to that issue with the shield I asked her if the perfect circle was important to her in her work. Yes. Is asymmetry in the form ever welcomed or valued aesthetically. No. Not much more was said about it but it helpfully led our conversation to the act and not the object, so I remembered that.

Later, in one of the mornings of the workshop, I introduced a very short exercise to demonstrate how to mix colours (Figure 3), based on Goethe’s colour wheel. A circle was divided into six with red, yellow and blue in alternative segments, followed by orange, green and purple in the spaces. An outer circle had the same colours as half tones – red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green etc. In the middle a lighter tone was made. The idea was to show possibilities available with only three colours, and give the artists more control over the way they used paint rather than being limited to using paints directly from the tin/tube. But when everyone began, the thing that took the most time, (and that everyone seemed most compelled by) was drawing accurate circles and clear segments. Danilo Parra pointed this out too and we were teasing everyone – “hurry up, never mind the circle, just focus on the colours!”

Figure 3. Colour wheel workshop in São Pedro community, Rio Tiquié, March 2024

That made me remember this by Stephen Hugh-Jones,

Various spoken metaphors of lines, circles and segments that Upper Rio Negro peoples use to talk about time. These same lines, circles and segments reappear in visible, material form in the familiar domestic world where manioc tubers are processed into flat, round cakes of manioc bread. Here the tipiti manioc press and shallow balay basket suggest line and circle whilst woven designs divide balays into segments just as each cake of manioc bread is cut into four neat segments and stored in a balay.[1]

In the Annual Cycle drawings that ISA has worked on for many years, the visual transcription of these cultural-ecological calendars also have segmented circular designs. (Figure 4)

Figure 4. Annual Cycles. Calendar of Indigenous people of the Rio Tiquié

Returning to Spruce’s shield in Kew, there are patterns in the surface drawn with a latex (known as breu or anani). The shield was photographed under UV light (I need to cite paper and add more information on this) and the patterns could be show more clearly, but even from the daylight photograph the pattern can be seen, two segments radiating out from the centre across the circumference and shorter ‘segments’ in between. (see Figure 1).

I’ve recently unrolled those drawings and thought it was time to work again on the pencil outlines.

It’s hard to know where the motivation comes for drawing one thing over another. But all of this to say that it’s the drawing that provides the ‘noticing’ which makes visual ideas into questions. Most of the ideas or connections that happen when drawing might be fleeting but some stick more.  Is the circle important? Yes.


[1] Stephen Hugh-Jones (2016) Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper: Myth,

History and Memory in NW Amazonia, History and Anthropology, 27:2, 154-182