PRINTING WITH PLANTS
The desire to find a sustainable way of textile printing has been my aspiration since a long time. Since my first contact with silkscreen printing it turned into my favorite technique of textile decoration. There is a big variety of textile colours and pastes. Most of them are pretty strong in their toxicity. Working with those colours started to molest me and that’s why I started researching less aggressive options. The goal of my research is on one hand, the technical challenge and the saving of resources. On the other hand, I want to be able to work with the technique in my atelier without water filtering system and avoid the odor of solvents, laborious cleaning and skin harmings.
With the exchange program from Atelier Mondial, I had the chance to focus on this topic in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, I elaborated the first recipes for printing with organic pigments on textiles.
Para la serigrafía con pigmentos orgánicos, hay que preparar los tejidos, extraer el pigmento, hacer una pasta de impresión y fijar el color. Todos estos pasos se realizan sin productos químicos. Todos los ingredientes pueden devolverse al medio ambiente sin problemas. Estas características son extremadamente importantes porque en muchos lugares no existe un sistema de filtración y el agua fluye directamente al jardín de las casas.
For screen printing with organic pigments, the textiles have to be prepared, the pigment extracted, a printing paste made and the color fixed. All these steps take place without chemicals. All ingredients can be returned to the environment without concern. These features are extremely important because in many places does not exist a filtration system and the water flows directly into the home garden.
Un paso importante era la elaboración de un muestrario de colores que, por un lado, documenta la investigación, pero también puede servir de catálogo de colores.
An important step was the elaboration of a colour fan, which on the one hand documents the research but can also serve as a colour catalogue.
