These are soil studies investigating my relationship with ochres and the legacy of iron. I made them over several years, and their shape evolved from window-like pallets, to mausoleum alcoves, to the more recent works, akin to boundary markers.

Everything is foraged or gifted from the place or land named in each title. They are made mostly with ochre, stones, iron, geologic sediments and necrosols (death soils) that I learn from, care for and love, some are over 3 billion years old.

Because ochres contain iron and oxygen (like our blood and the core of the Earth) they are called, “the stone that bleeds,” but I consider them the stones that breathe, the stones that remember. They are also the stones that die when their iron innards are extracted to make the steel weapons and metallic backbones of colonial technologies. To me, pounding earth into color or gathering rust is rooted in ancestral work, ghost work, spiritual practice, also earth grief. As a granddaughter of Iron People (the Indigenous Haida term for early European colonists, trappers and settlers), Scandinavian soil workers, and Pacific Northwest blacksmiths, working with ochre is an attempt to carry and transmute this inheritance.

When I make these studies, it feels a bit like dissecting an owl pellet, picking out little shards, trying to recover some semblance and skeletal shape of a perhaps still living, breathing, geologic animal.

I’m curious how to commit ochre places to heart, what practices and protocols are required? I find courage in rudimentary instincts: like how a child recites the same song verse over and over, day after day; a mother bear instinctually follows ancestral trails century after century; or some old monk transmits a lifetime of repeated mantras and sacred texts on their deathbed, simply by sweeping the floor.

For my culture, and many others, the art of gathering and processing regional ochres into pigment is designated as an endangered traditional heritage craft. The obscure knowledge such as ochre’s special use in burial ritual, spirit travel and spellbinding is already, presumed, lost…

—Heidi Gustafson

Heidi Gustafson is an artist, master ochre forager, and necromancer who lives and works in the rural Pacific Northwest. Her highly collaborative and intuitive projects include the Ochre Archive, an internationally renowned collective of over 900 natural ochre and iron-earth pigments.

Her research and practice have been featured in the New York Times, American Craft, Art Das Kunstmagazin, The Dark Mountain Project, 读者, The International Database for Artistic Research, The Soil Keepers and much elsewhere. She’s the author of Book of Earth: A Guide to Ochre, Pigment, and Raw Color.

A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Gustafson studied forensic science at the University of Baltimore, and received an MA in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Find her at earlyfutures.com and on instagram @heidilynnheidilynn.