Georgina Barney is an artist based at Primary, a contemporary art complex in Nottingham where she oversees a dye garden, growing plants to make dyes, inks and paints. Georgina shares these skills through her workshop enterprise Plant Dye Studio.
Georgina says: Weld (Nottingham Ring Road) is what it says it is. The plant is exhibited in the noticeboard, and the silk dyed with it is the flag. Weld is an historic dye plant, used for centuries in Britain for yellow and to make the famous ‘Lincoln Green’ associated with Robin Hood (first dyed blue with woad). As weld grows in the most inhospitable of places including roadside verges, it feels like a post-apocalyptic plant. A plant for the future and the past. It’s also a very urban one. It’s a wave from a roadside in Nottingham to one in Uffington…
When people ask me what I make, I say I make colours from plants. I make dyes, inks and paints. When people ask me what I make with those, it gets harder to explain. Often, the point is purely the process: of seeing what colours emerge and living with those for a while. It teaches me to let go and live with the imperfect; that in fact, the imperfect is beautiful. Sometimes, as in the Noticeboard United project, there needs to be a resolution, a thing. I try to keep it as simple as possible. The colour is the artwork. All I try to do is resolve the material into a form that keeps the colour as the centrepiece.