Artists’ description of the project:

“A Lumigraph, or light field, is a four-dimensional representation of light rays passing through an empty volume of space, and Tinctoria is a Latin suffix which refers to a plant’s use in dyeing.

We employ the word ‘Lumigraph’ poetically, in part to speak about the fourth dimension of this project, the “invisible fabric” (Joachim Koester) of relations with both our human and more than human collaborators through the slow processes of growing, nurturing, processing and dyeing.

The plot in its current form was designed and drawn up by Patrick, who works as a therapeutic horticulturalist and community arts facilitator at TWIGS community garden. Rainbow coloured plant beds splay outwards from a circular pond in the plot’s centre. Its formal resemblance to colours radiating from a lens was an emergent rather than conscious design decision, though it does very much connect with our ongoing conversations about attention, care, notions of ‘diffraction’, power dynamics, and our experiments with glass.

Past Fig projects informed and continue to echo through this current iteration. Nor Greenhalgh’s composting and archaeological trench from the Elder Vernacular project in 2021 became our pond. The chard grown the year before for photographic emulsions for local artist John Blythe self-seeded and resolutely sprang up to the point that we decided we had to keep a bed of it and try our own version of the anthotype process, something which is meshing excitingly with our glasswork.”

The project is currently in a research phase, testing different approaches to planting, dyeing, and sharing, with opportunities for public engagement planned for later in 2023 and 2024.

Check back for further news and Journal posts on the project soon!

See more of Rosie’s work on her instagram here.