CONTACT
info@wildpigmentproject.org
Tilke Elkins is a writer and artist who collaborates with place to compose what she calls 'color music': carefully calibrated focal points in the landscape that arise through site-made botanical and mineral paints, inks and dyes, and deepen interconnection.
In 2019, Elkins initiated a global movement in foraged mineral and botanical pigments, with the coining of the term ‘wild pigments’ and the founding of Wild Pigment Project. The project brought together artists, paint and ink-makers, natural dyers, cultural stewards, scientists, anthropologists and many others working in the field of gathered artists' pigments. This network was instrumental in presenting foraged pigments and paint-making to the public eye, and increasing their appearance in the contemporary art world.
Through Wild Pigment Project, Elkins introduced foraged colorants and the concept of what she called ‘palette remediation’ to several college art department heads in the Pacific Northwest, including Daniela Naomi Molnar, artist and founding director of the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Elkins and Molnar later led an online course, The Poetics of Pigment.
Along with ochre expert Heidi Gustafson and pigment researcher Melonie Ancheta, Elkins co-organized the first global pigment symposium, Pigments Revealed International, in 2021. She led discussions about pigment foraging and paint-making at the University of Oregon and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and taught multiple cross-country workshops, including Pigments of Place and Palette Remediation at WIldCraft Studio School (2020-2021), and Pigmentshed at the Fibershed Institute.
As curator, Elkins assembled an influential group exhibit in 2022 featuring 28 contemporary artists working with foraged pigments, which travelled from form & concept gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico to the Museum of Art at New Mexico State University. She was a participating artist in Feeding the Unseen: Remediations of Earth at the Philosophical Research Society in LA in 2023, and has had solo shows of her pigment work at form & concept gallery and at the Paragon Arts Gallery at Portland Community College. She has been featured in American Craft Magazine, and on podcasts Green Dreamer, Ground Shots, and Santa Fe's Coffee and Culture.
Elkins' in-person and international online Being With Pigments courses, offered since 2020, are deep-dives into relating with place through collaborations with plants, minerals and found materials as paints, inks and dyes.
She lives in the desert in White Shell Water Place, also known as Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently engaged in the making of a book about her relationship with place as color.