September 2025 – A Summer Course

This September I decamped for a few days to Ullapool, to take part in a fantastic course, ‘Out of this Earth’, run by acclaimed fibre artist Claire Benn and held at Bridge House Art.

The course was designed to introduce us to an ecological method of binding natural earth, mineral and synthetic pigments to textiles or paper using soya milk. We learned about pigments, how to prepare our cloth, make our own soya milk and pre-size the cloth to receive pigments. We also learnt how to make ’soypig paint’ in both liquid and thickened forms and we explored a wide range of application approaches.

The course was enormous fun! We created a whole repertoire of pieces based on different techniques and experiments. Camping by Loch Broom was an added adventure, which included early morning dips… of course.