Making and materials

In Ibby’s work natural found and foraged materials are used to make pigments, inks and tools. In their specificity to time, place and individual life, and in the labour of their making, the pigments become infinitely precious, a finite resource that can never be exactly replicated. Earth is dried and sifted to a fine powder; stones are pounded and washed; plants are simmered and laked. Found bones and fallen twigs are charred in the absence of air and reduce in the mortar to dusts dense with ghosts. Mixed with oil they are ground with a glass muller on the slab, and slowly, slowly, the material world becomes ink and paint, telling stories of its own.

Bone black in linseed oil

Bone black on gesso

Earth from the garden

Earth from the woods, with walnut oil before grinding

Charcoaled field maple twig

Charcoal with linseed oil before grinding

Sharpened fox bone, for drawing

Gesso panels drying in the studio. Battered copy of Thompson’s ‘The Practice of Tempera Painting’

Making bone black. Found bones of fox, crow and roe deer

Drawings are made on oak panels, waste off cuts from the timber industry. They are layered in gesso, a traditional method of panel preparation once used for altar pieces. Wherever possible the work becomes collaborative, and tools are created from sharpened feathers and bone; found animal hair; sheep’s wool caught in hedges. All materials are collected ethically, in small amounts, and only if they are to be found in abundance. Bones have been gathered over years; feathers have been dropped and carried on the wind; twigs fell in the last storm; wild plants are harvested after seeding. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘honourable harvest’ is a guiding principle.