In March 2022 I headed out to Oaxaca, Mexico to join an instructional artist residency with Arquetopia Foundation where I was due to spend four weeks learning how to make natural inks for silk-screen printing.
After one night spent in Mexico City, 9 hours spent on a coach and another night spend in Oaxaca, it was finally time to join two other artists at our meet up point to be taken up to the residency a short drive out of town, and slightly up to the mountains. After spending a couple of days getting acquainted with the two writers I was sharing the space with, and getting settled into a desk space in the studio annex, it was time to head out to my first Natural Ink making session with my teacher Manuel.
Twice a week I was driven to Manuel’s studio and farm where he grew all of his own pigment plants and nurtured his cochineal insects in the garden.
The focus for the first two weeks was identifying the plants, harvesting, and extracting the pigments. The process brought back old memories from chemistry class, and familiar contraptions. As chemistry goes, the process and required kit was simple enough to recreate at home with different coloured enamel mugs creating an extra familial feel.
Finally, it was time to grind up the extracted pigment with a gold old pestle and a mortar to make it fine enough to mix into a printing medium. Manuel watched me over my shoulder for a while as I ground and ground the hard segments of colour until finally calmly stating in his slightly broken English: “Sanni, how do you say…you kill me.”
Not much was to be done about my lack of arm muscle, so I kept grinding but this quote has since been many times repeated when telling the story of my dear teacher Manuel.
The final week of my residency I spent testing the colours that I had made, creating mixtures from grains of different pigments. Whilst, I had been the one painstakingly making these pigments step-by-step, it still felt incedibly magical that these colours were emerging from what had been leaves, wood, and insects just a few weeks ago. Putting a new tone down onto my test swatch patch, I was surprised each time.
To create a print using my ready natural inks, we exposed some screens for printing with. The exposure could be done outside in tens of seconds in the scorching sun – another revelation to this Nordic girl! The last moments of my residency were dedicated to making pieces, dying fabric, printing and trying out endless colour combinations. The residency was not the end of my time in Mexico but instead served as a great starting point for two more months of travel around the country seeking and finding inspiration, connection, and local art scenes.
Sanni Pyhänniska 
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