About
Flora lives on the western edge of Dartmoor, where she grows, forages, and makes colour.
Her work is about place based natural colour making, and education. She is passionate about making plant based colour application processes for textiles and paper more accessible through online courses and events on this website as well as programming guest teachers on her learning platform plantsandcolour.com. Encouraging you to work with locally available plants to make vibrant and enduring colours for craft, art, and design practices.
Exploring and sharing how to make dyes, inks, and paints out of plants for drawing, painting, printing, and dyeing textiles and paper. Working with wild and cultivated plants to produce a variety of vibrant colours. Observing and learning from the plants that grow around us.
She works with artists and crafts people around the world who wish to transition their practice to working with locally available plants. Sharing recipes, and processes for exploring the possibilities of the plants that are accessible to grow or forage where you live. Making an online global community of botanical ink and paint makers, dyers, and printmakers, sharing stories of plant connection, colour explorations, and beautiful artwork created from handmade paints and inks. Creating learning communities is a very important part of my work, for sharing stories of our experiences with plants, bringing plant wisdom back into common knowledge again.
She came to this work after leaving the design industry through a desire to connect with the land through practical craft and growing. Working with plants such as camellia and buddleia flowers, oak galls, and dock roots, or growing dye plants in her garden such as madder, woad, and coreopsis. Creating drawings, paintings, and prints as one-off explorations of plant-based surface application bringing together natural dyeing, ink and paint making, and printmaking.
Growing up in the countryside in Gloucestershire, Flor was taught to paint and print by her mother as a child, who designs textiles for interiors; she inherited her mother’s fascination with colour and love of making. Following a degree in product design at Glasgow School of Art, she sought to reconnect with my family roots in textiles and printmaking, as well as with the natural raw elements of where materials come from. She came to Devon to study permaculture (Earth Activist Training), horticulture (Schumacher College), and wild plants (Ffyona Campbell & Rhizome), and stayed living here.
Her interest in plants and fungi go beyond colour. She tries to live and work in rhythm with the seasons, the foraging and growing food, dyes, and medicines.
To be wild is to know how to look after ourselves. To be in relationship with the plants growing around us intimately. There are no weeds, only medicines, foods, dye plants, and craft materials.
About Her Online Courses
After many years of practicing and teaching in person, Flora created online courses to make the work of colour making more accessible. In 2022, she brought her online teaching work together in to a year course that she runs most years in order to offer an comprehensive learning experience for artists and makers interested in transitioning their practice to working with natural ingredients to try out a variety of approaches.
The 2024 group will be the fourth cohort of year course students.
This course has been refined over the years as she has re-organised and upgraded the resources to be more user friendly, with the new online member area to make it easier to access information and keep track of where you are in the course.
The idea is that this year course is an introduction to many different approaches to colour making, and it will only be in the years afterwards that you will really delve deeply in to these practices. You will retain access to the resources and handbook beyond the year so you can continue to refer back.