Not only do flowers and plants provide beauty and health, but they can also produce methods of discovery and experimentation. Natural dye is an art with a variety of methods, forms, and purposes. We’ve interviewed a handful of natural dyers to showcase this art. Each post will feature a different guest — exploring how to use our gardens to bring unexpected color into our lives. Our first guest is Madeleine Provost, a textile artist and natural dyer from New Jersey.

Mad’s Introduction to Natural Dye

“My first memory of working with natural color was as a kid making finger paint from the mulberry tree in our backyard,” Mad reminisces. “I always was obsessed with making things with my hands, all things art and color related. I went on to study fashion design in NYC at Parsons School of Design, fascinated by how individuals and cultures express their intangible essence and character through wearable color and shapes, a visual language I wanted to learn. My senior thesis collection explored natural dyes and handcraft and how they relate to sustainable design practices, everything was hand dyed and sewn with zero waste construction.”

Witnessing Interactions

Like many artisan crafts, learning from an experienced natural dyer is one of the best ways to successfully begin. “ I highly recommend taking a workshop with an artist or dyer whose work you admire. There is no amount of reading or youtube videos that can replace the experience of learning from another individual, and watching the nuances of how they interact with plants and fibers and physically move through the process. Some of the most impactful experiences I have had were just watching how someone lovingly placed fabric into a dye pot or massaged a garment as they rinsed it. The most important details are often the simplest, but hardest to communicate with words.”

View Mad’s offered workshops on her website.

A Changed Path

Mad has turned her passion for natural dyes into a successful business, but on top of that, what other benefits has she experienced?

“When I started consistently and seriously working with natural dyes, particularly foraging and growing my own plants to use, it was like my world expanded.” For so many years, I was living like a zombie going from point A to point B without seeing anything or anyone in between. I was commuting to a job where I made things for people I would never meet and worked with people across the world who were just names on an email chain, using fabrics made from plants or proteins whose origins I would never know, dyed with meaningless synthetic lab-made colors. I didn’t even realize how disconnected I was from my surroundings, from the earth, from my neighbors, my clothes, my food, and honestly from myself - until I started paying attention to plants.”

Intentional Inspiration

Each artist has his or her own patterns or methods for stimulating creativity. Mad told us she finds inspiration in tension and challenge. “I live in urban Jersey City, just a hop skip and jump away from the Big Apple (Manhattan) and so my interactions with nature have to be intentional,” she elaborated with us. “I like the challenge of finding nature in a city or challenging landscape, and currently am inspired by noxious ‘weeds’ and species that thrive in disturbed and rough environments.“

Just as one’s physical environment shapes and guides the artistic process, one’s mental state can also have an exceptional influence.

“I like to get into a meditative state of mind with my daily dye practice, which is to create one small dyed piece a day to keep my hands and muscle memory fresh as well as my mind. This process of allowing myself to create something without any expectation or outcome, just letting one mark follow another, acts as an inspiration for me to see that sometimes you learn more from being present and intuitive rather than consumed by thoughts or calculated planning.”

Living Color

Homegrown flowers are a favorite of Mad’s and we can’t blame her. “There is nothing so satisfying as growing your own living color! … Currently I am using a lot of coreopsis and tango cosmos in my work since I have a lot of blooms, but soon I am expecting to work with my black knight scabiosa (purple pin cushion) flowers and homegrown indigo (persicaria tinctoria) from the garden I have made on my fire escape. I like using my homegrown plants because I feel more connected to them, and can also study the health of the plants through the color outcomes I get and plan to continue experimenting with different conditions moving forward like sunlight exposure, soil composition, symbiotic systems, etc and how these affect my dyes.”

View Halden’s selection of Coreopsis, Scabiosa, and Cosmos Seeds.

View more of Mad’s inspiring work on her website or on Instagram at @mad_provost

 Photos by Mad Provost, Greeshma Chenniveetil, and Nathan Cyprys