The Pigment Farm

About

The Pigment Farm is the latest initiative of the Material Research Project. The farm aims to propagate plants in order to explore the world of natural dyes and develop an understanding and low-tech practical knowledge of growing and manufacture, explored through a series of open workshops and lectures devoted to producing colour. The farm also aims to enrich the environment and create an everyday opportunity for the UCL community to experience the cultivation of colour and engage in wellbeing activities. It is a place for artists, scientists, historians and conservationists to experiment and analyse common materials. The results of research stemming from these investigations will be disseminated on the Methods Room blog and Instagram, featuring up-dates and images of the farm’s progress.  

Conceived at the end of 2019 the original plan to grow plants in dedicated areas in the quad and other areas on campus was delayed due pandemic although members of the working group began cultivating plants on satellite sites and we continued to develop long term plans and exploring a number of avenues particularly in respect of furthering our horticultural knowledge.  

In 2024 we were successful in winning the UCL logo competition with our design to create a UCL logo with integrated planters made out of solid oak and serve as planters for the Slade Pigment Farm each letter stained in a different pigment, harvested from the farm. They include madder, woad, and weld, dyers broom weed which give a red, blue, and yellow dye respectively, a primary palette.   You can read the post about this project on the UCL News website.

The Pigment Farm was officially launched in the summer of 2020 with a series of lectures and the recordings can be found can be found on our Lectures Page. 

Jo Volley 

The Pigment Farm is very grateful for financial support from UCL Friend’s Trust in 2019 and The Campus Experience Team.  

Pigment Farm Working Group

Merry Chow

My academic interests span across contemporary art and modern materials, with a particular focus on performance art, installations and bioart. After my internship at the Sculpture and Installation Department at Tate, I am currently working at the Conservation Laboratory at UCL Institute of Archaeology while pursuing my PhD in Heritage Studies. My research focuses on conservation in the age of the Anthropocene, the role nonhuman agency in conservation and the relation of posthumanism and contemporary conservation practices.

See Merry’s Conservator-in-residence page for more information.

Leisa Clemente

Leisa Clemente is Departmental Manager and PA to the Head of Department in UCL Earth Sciences. She is also a gardener and tends a number of Pigment Farm plants on the balcony in Earth Sciences.

 

Lea Collet

Lea Collet’s work (b.1989, France) vacillates between collaboration, performance, installations, video and fiction. Through the writing and performance of open scenarios, her productions explore technological rituals, botanical translation, social ecology, speculative storytelling and collective mythologies. Lea Collet studied at Camberwell College of Arts, London at BA level followed by an MA at Slade School of Fine Art, London. She now works at the Slade.

Emily Furnell

Emily Furnell grew up in Bristol, which was voted the happiest city to live in the UK in 2019 by a Gala Bingo study. She studied Fine Art at Bath School of Art and Design, and prior to this, won a rosette in primary school for ‘best smiler’ which she still cherishes to this day. Her practice involves seeing what happens to materials when they are combined and how they develop over time. She has made pigments from synthetic and organic chemicals, and once made a batch of gesso tinted with copper sulphate that bubbled over the melting pot. Emily is the Workshop Manager , Institute of Making(Bloomsbury).  She enjoys the phrase ‘very gently’.

James Keith

James Keith is the print technician at the Slade School of Fine Art.

 

Stephanie Nebbia

Artist in Residence at ColArt where George Fields notebooks and the W&N archive of pigments are housed. I run the Global Fine Art Collective that provides residencies, workshops and bursaries. During my BA at Camberwell I made all my own paints including encaustics and, on my MA, my primary concern was on surfaces and print. I have an allotment near Peckham where I grow woad and am looking to expand an entire bed to grow further pigment plants and seedlings for Elephant West.

Kim Selvaggi

Kim is currently a PhD student at the Slade School of Art. She was Conservator-in-residence 2020-2021.

See Conservator in Residence page for biog.

Lesley Sharpe

Lesley Sharpe is a visual artist working in print with an interest in hybrid processes, combining both traditional and digital printmaking techniques. Her work explores the conceptual and material interpretation of landscapes that are undergoing transformation and their mediation through the printed image. She currently holds a Lecturer (Teaching) post at the Slade School of Fine Art, specialising in printmaking.

Her interest and contribution to the Pigment Farm stems from her rural past growing up in the heart of the East Ayrshire Coalfield community, and more recent care for an early Victorian cottage garden in Leyton, East London where many of the established plant species will contribute to the Pigment Farms research aims.

Other research includes Structures of Forgotten Origin, a field study of historic and recent landscape that borrows practices from psycho-geography, agriculture, photography, printmaking and randonneurring. The collaborative project aims to circumnavigate the Metropolitan Green Belt retracing the 200+ coal posts which were erected by the city of London in the mid 19th Century as boundary markers where taxes on coal were due. The obelisks form a circular network approximately 15 miles from the city and were cast in a variety of different materials to include granite, cast iron and stone. Combining scientific techniques with photographic processes, such as soil chromatography to analyse each site, the project attempts to explore ideas of the periphery, our relationship to the temporal and spatial variations of landscape and the trade routes connected to the production of coal-based pigments used in printmaking.

Dr Ruth Siddall

Dr Ruth Siddall is a geologist who studies the mineralogy of cultural materials; pigments, stones, ceramics and cements in archaeological and contemporary contexts. Educated at the University of Birmingham and at UCL, she has conducted research into materiality in classical and medieval archaeological contexts and has recently held the post of Scientist in Residence at the Slade School of Fine Art. She has been using this period of lockdown to improve her knowledge of organic chemistry as applied to colour and has been making dyes and lake pigments from natural plant materials. Ruth is a co-author of the Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historic Pigments.

Dr Dean Sully

Dean Sully is Associate Professor in Conservation at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, where he co-ordinates the MSc in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums.

He is a co-ordinator of the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) and the Curating the City Research Cluster, National Trust’s Conservation Advisor for Archaeological Artefacts, Emeritus Scientist-in-Residence at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, Conservator-in-Residence at the Material Museum, and Director of the Illegal Museum of Beyond.

See Dr Dean Sully’s UCL Profile page for more information.

Jo Volley

Jo Volley is an artist and Coordinator of the Material Research Project & Network and the Material Museum. Her work is concerned with measurement, light, space and colour as light, and employs a wide range of material and medium. A great deal of her practice involves the investigation of artists’ methods and materials particularly colour which is central to her practice. As part of the Pigment Farm project she is developing a seasonal timeline of colours found in plants.

On 22^nd March 2020 along with Ruth Siddall she established World Pigment Day and is documenting its inaugural year with project A Colour A Day which can be found on The Pigment Timeline blog.

She is currently Artist in Residence at UCL Institute of Archaeology Conservation Dept investigating historic inks and pigments. Her most recent commission  is to develop a wall work for the public spaces of the new UCL DRI-IoN building exploring  the topic of colour and dementia.

 

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Lecture Series