The "Botanical Chemy" Story

India Flint

It was an ordinary day.  Reading another story that was published in the "What Women Create" magazine.  Story was about a woman named India Flint.  Now...if I were a woman...I would have loved to have been named India Woods.  Perhaps the most unusual name I could have imagined.  India's work conflates the visual and written poetics of place and memory, using walking, drawing, assemblage, dyeing, stitch, image-making and text to interpret country.  Guess you figured by now that I didn't come up with all those fancy words, didn't you?  Hey...they sounded good in the magazine...so I thought I'd use them.  India's parents were two fascinating people who arrived in Australia with their families as refugees from the mid-century war in Europe and met at a University.  India's father was a scientist and musician who studied both piano and violin while her mother was an artist, poet and dreamer who wove cloth in traditional Latvian patterns; designed and knitted complicated snowflake-patterned ski sweaters and made ceramic dinnerware.  She evidentally was born with Lativian patterns in her blood!  Though so different, her parents shared many interests, among them language (both German and Latvian were spoken in their home) and gardening; creating magical green places in which India's imagination could run wild. Her father raised trees from collected seeds, grafted multiple fruit varieties together before it became fashionable and grew splendid vegetables. Her mother filled just about any available space in their garden with flowers, especially roses.  If she sat down to rest, she would pick up her embroidery. She could grow chrysanthemum plants from a single leaf and spent summers putting up preserves, making jam and cooking cordials to help them through the winter.  Her mother also sewed all their clothes, even her fathers, and is wasn't until she became a teenager that she was permitted to wear jeans.  Each Easter her mother would gather herbs from the kitchen garden along with strawberry and colder leaves and dried grasses and they would sit down together at the kitchen table, carefully layering the fresh offerings inside dampened onion shells before resting an egg in the middle and then tying the whole thing up with thread, much as a spider might tie up their lunch.  It was a tradition that pre-dates Christianity and has been handed down the Latvian side of her family for as long as anyone can remember.  The bundling took place on the Saturday of the Easter weekend.  The eggs were then placed in a pot with leftover onion shells and brought to a simmer for 20 minutes before the heat was turned off and the stew was allowed to cool.  When the table had been cleared, they would unwrap the eggs, marveling at the prints on each one.  After drying, the eggs would be buffed to a glow.  Onion-dyed thread would be carefully wound onto paper spools for later use in embroidery.  Nothing was ever wasted.  It was no small wonder that she grew up fascinated by plants and with a leaning toward the creative arts.  Today, India is happily realizing the long-held dream of designing her own home which is to be built within sight of the sea.  It was in 1998 that India gave the name to her art as ecoprint.  For some time she considered calling it "eucaprint," but as the technique can be performed with almost any form of vegetation, that made no sense.  Bocoprint would have been be a snappy choice, but lacked the romance of the process, really best described as botanical alchemy and compressed as botanicalchemy.  She is still learning the practice, but someday hoping she can offer the outcome as a course at the School of Nomad Arts. I wish her all the best in her adventures and hope she will find her calling in the arts.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.  Following are a few of India's work...