Natural Dyes

American Cyborg has a parliament of Owls: artists whose practices circle around materials, care, and process. That August, I traveled with two of them to Rhode Island, where a third Owl welcomed us into her home and garden. She had been growing dye plants all season — marigolds, coreopsis, cosmos, black-eyed susans — and she taught us how to turn them into color.

The technique was bundle dyeing: laying petals and leaves on fabric, rolling them tightly into a bundle, binding with string, and steaming until the shapes bled into one another. When we unwrapped our cloths, the flowers had left behind shadows of themselves — orange bursts, yellow suns, ghostly silhouettes of stems. It felt like coaxing a print out of the garden itself.

The process was slow and domestic, but also radical. To grow your own pigments is to reimagine consumption; to dye with plants is to tie color back to soil, water, and seasons. The Owls reminded me that an artist’s palette doesn’t have to come from a tube. It can come from tending, harvesting, sharing.

Donna Haraway might call this a “companion practice”: a way of being with plants that resists extraction and treats dye as a collaboration, not a resource. Each bundle became a record of the flowers that month, in that place, in that household. Each pattern was unrepeatable.

I thought of how the Owls themselves were like the fabrics — gathered together, bound in a circle, leaving impressions on one another. That day in Rhode Island, art was not just the outcome but the gathering itself. The dyeing was beautiful, but the more lasting stain was the sense of community.