Dust to Dust:
A Geology of Color

Metals and pigments are co-directors of our creative, evolutionary process.
Heidi Gustafson
Photo by Heidi Gustafson
Author: Heidi Gustafson
Web: earlyfutures.com
Date: June 5, 2019

I’m a recovering philosopher who forages and crushes rock for a living. I work as a hermitic artist in rural Washington. Most of my days are spent investigating the metamorphic life of pigments, and the agency they have in human and planetary processes.

Why? For one thing, art is chock-full of sediment and geological material, but as it turns out, how we experience art—and how we form aesthetic experience itself—also grounds our biological capabilities, informing and transforming our very being. In other words, pigments are our co-evolutionary partners and affect our everyday lives.

I want to give a personal account of how pigments impact our lives through a practice I call aesthetic reception. There’s a lot of ground to cover. First, what are pigments? What are they for? Why search for them? Unlike other gathering, gleaning, or tracking practices, such as mushroom foraging, there isn’t a commonly understood knowledge of foraging for “pigments,” nor is there a distinct awareness of what pigments do.

What Are Earth Pigments?

Pigments are crushed up (or extracted) material that give us a color experience. Earth pigments are crushed up from mineral rocks, soil, clay, mud, or other earthen lumps of geological material. They’re powdered land, in Afrikaans, grondstof, meaning “ground stuff” or “ground dust.”

I forage mineral pigments from landforms, as opposed to organic pigments, which are derived from biological materials like plants and insects, or synthetic pigments that are derived from chemical processes. Specifically, I focus on stones and soils containing iron. According to the archaeological record, human cognition emerged at least 200,000–300,000 years ago, and coincided with the regular use of earth pigments, namely iron ochres and their multivalent capabilities as physical and imaginal influencers. Iron-based pigments are primordial collaborators in world-wide human and nonhuman expressions and art forms.

Scientists have learned that ochre pigments, especially the red ochres of hematite, were used by early Homo sapiens for a variety of purposes, including in their first images and cave drawings; in grave burials, rituals, and ceremonies; on vessels and beads; in medicine, sunscreen, adhesives, and food preservatives; and for other complex uses that required an extraordinary array of social skills. As the anthropologist Dr. Riaan Rifkan (2015) puts it, iron pigments play an important role in enabling humans to modify natural selection within their eco-cultural environments. This effectively permitted early modern humans to act as co-directors of their own evolutionary processes” (10).

Red soil 'dm of iron oxide, Hormuz Island in Iranian Persian Gulf. Photo by Sheena Callage.

It should come as no surprise that iron (Fe) pigment plays an important role in these creative processes, as Earth itself is already an iron-centric being, with its gigantic, spinning iron core acting as a planetary hearth. Many indigenous cultures also saw, and still see, red ochre as a central guide in their lives. As Paul Campbell notes, “The Atsugewi Native Americans, for example, in Northern California, prized red ochre above all other colors and they kept it even in a deer pericardium, that’s the sac that holds the heart that pumps the blood” (emphasis added).

The image of a pulsating heart emphasizes that pigments are not lifeless rocks. Constantly circulating, they are mysterious metamorphic agents of art made by complex ecologies, biomes, volcanos, extinct creatures, fault lines, sea-floors, swamps, deserts, fertile soils, and dead people and their living waste. Such shadowy, energetic places undergo hundreds, millions, or even billions of years of sedimentary activity and transformation. And yet, we are able to hold pieces of them in our hands, not unlike a beating heart.

Humans are themselves displays of complex sedimentary process. “In the human there is material, fragment, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos,” a stone-loving Nietzsche once proclaimed (Beyond Good and Evil, 117). We grow magnetite rocks in our heads, hematite in our organs, carbonates in our bones, gorgeous crystalline geodes in our kidneys, and when we die, our minerals are redistributed, largely as ashes or clumps of carbon, oxygen, calcium, phosphorus, nitrogen, and a handful of others elements. Dust to dust.

What Are Pigments For?

Humans utilize mineral pigments in diverse, yet rather formulaic ways.

We make creative material—nearly all traditional art materials—by grinding earth into pigment powder and combining it with a fluid called a binder, a vehicle, a mordant, or a medium such as water, tree resins, saliva, animal fat, egg yolk, blood, polymers, or flora and fauna juices of all kinds.

In traditional religious paintings, for example, golden halos begin as a base layer of red ochre pigment (called ‘dm, “Adam, red clay, or primordial human”) mixed with the unborn embryo of a bird (the bird being the symbol for πνεῦμα, pnuema, spirit, soul, or breath). This is called egg tempera paint. As art historian James Elkins notes, “A painting is made of paint—of fluids and stone—and paint has its own logic, and its own meanings even before it is shaped into the head of a Madonna” (What Painting Is, 2). Our images leap forth from more basic earth elements.

This is true of everything that surrounds you right now. Find something colored in your environment—the black on your computer keys, the red in your lipstick, or the white in your notepad—that color is a relationship with a material, derived from a specifically sourced pigment. Perhaps the black is from Russian magnetite, mined from the world’s largest magnetic anomaly. Maybe the red is from ancient volcanic soil from the Persian Gulf in Iran. Perhaps the white is from ancient marine organisms compressed, heated, and uplifted into California marble.

Isibomvu, red ochre pigment ball sold in South African muthi (medicine) shops. Used by healing doctors, who put medicinal ochre on their face before training and/or healing. Gift of Dr. Tammy Hodgskiss, curator, Wits Origins Centre Museum, S. Africa.

All of this is to say, there is a material supply chain for color. A deep, geomorphic time chain, as well as a continuous and sprawling human chain gang of mining and distribution projects. Color is not some design spec Pantone or Munsell swatch floating in vague digital space. Color is social, behavioral, messy, tangible stuff. No matter how abstracted, eventually our colored worlds harken back to very specific somewheres and several somebodies bludgeoning the rainbow.

Material pigments are mined, dug up, and sluffed off from a specific biographical location. A single color experience—red, for example—can emerge from many different places. Red mineral pigments come from very distinct elemental substances: iron oxide (Fe2O3) hematite, mercury sulfide (HgS) cinnabar, lead tetroxide (Pb3O4) minium, or arsenic sulfide (As4S4) realgar. Each of these minerals has a different elemental and physiological affect on human organisms. And each of these “reds” has a radically different origin story, history, and culture that lives with them. Their vitality, affect, and behavior as a pigment—as a “red” experience—are also, chemically and structurally, largely independent from one another.

Following a few vital ecological metallurgists—such as Gaston Bachelard, Felix Guattari, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, James Hillman, Jussi Parikka, and others—I’m trying to recover color as material as elemental as “teaming with material potentials that can be teased out in different constellations, temperatures, and conditions; this applies to the atomic level, where a metallurgist has a practical ‘know-how’ relation to metal that applies to the wider role metals play in cultural assemblages as nonhuman agents” (A Geology of Media, 23).

I’ll repeat myself, as an earth pigment forager, color equals metallurgical matter from somewhere. These material pigments are multivalent pieces of place, forged in the deep time of distinct cosmic and aesthetic forces. “Color” is an abstraction.

I am almost fine doing away with the word altogether.

What Do Pigments Do?

With ochre pigments I can leave marks beyond myself. I can draw pictures, make art. I can write, print, mock-up, make images. I can remember. I can put on make-up, cosmetics (from kosmos tekhnē, “universe art”), and differentiate myself, blend in, or attract. Pigments define our flags, structures, buildings, and walls; they evoke feeling or invoke separation, boundaries, stop signs. Fake blood. They simulate forests on prison walls. “Iron attracts poetry. . . . Iron seeds imagination” (28, 40), as Nor Hall so gracefully writes in her forge, Irons in the Fire.

Pigments also stimulate and act physiologically on the human organism—as internal medicine, sunscreen, mosquito repellent, spiritual protection, energy enhancer, heart rate modulator, anxiety reliever, anti-depressant, fertility signal, antifungal agent, glue, and more. Not to mention their psychological effects. Pigments change minds. They change bodies.

Foraged iron oxides and iron hydroxides and their pigments, from left to right: volcanic California hematite ca. 145 million years ago, hematite from abandoned steel kiln in Washington ca. 150 years ago, Goethite made from ancient microbial ocean activity in Australia, ca. 2+ billion years ago.

Sediment fissures into sentiment. The Latin root sedere, to settle or sit, becomes sentire, to experience. In that sense, pigments are stewards of an experimental, and bewildering, aesthetic threshold. They intensify, confuse, and reorganize our felt sense of inner and outer, imagination and manifestation, self and nature, past, present, and future. I share Rifkan’s hunch that pigments are co-directors of our creative, evolutionary process.

Foraging pigments to me means something like, cultivating relationship with direct mediators of aesthetic response. I consider this practice synonymous with doing philosophy. Or with witchcraft. And, of course, it’s art.

When I make pigment from a rock, a specific geologic event is occurring called soil-forming. Soil forms initially from the weathering of landscapes, from geology, from slowly broken rocks. As a human, when I crush a rock to make pigment, I accelerate this process. By creating pigment I am also futuring soil, making a place to sow those imaginal and, well, biological, seeds. My foraging participates in a planetary event. My work is part of a geological reverie.

How to Forage Land Pigments

Let me say a little bit about what skills foraging pigments invites. While the superficial practice of pigment gathering involves finding rocks and earthen stuff that produce colored pigment material, and thus negotiate aesthetic experience, this doesn’t mean I go into a landscape looking for bright, shiny rocks that will change my life or help me make paintings.

Visual perception is limited and deceptive. Many brightly colored rocks are “color experiences,” as forms, but when crushed up into powder, the color, materially, goes missing. The powder appears white, greyish, or clear, as the elemental structure of the rock is largely crystalline, transparent, silica (SiO2). Other examples from the phenomenology of color complicate the stability of “color” for various, complex reasons. Suffice to say there’s no consensus on what happens when we experience color or what we are “seeing” or how.

Spruce cones of vivianite, blue iron phosphate pigment, buried in tidal mud and mineralized during a tsunami event on the Oregon Coast. Photos in collaboration with Scott Sutton.

Color, as a concept, also tends to go missing. In any case, when I’m foraging in a field, some minerals appear as irrelevant mud globs, but then, upon opening them, they reveal shocking oceans of blue iron phosphate, or vivianite, a special pigment revered by European master painters, toxic algae remediation bioengineers, and Northwest Coast shamans alike.

To find rocks that remain color-participatory in our aesthetic experience, visual perception is important, but curiously, secondary. I must access more primal senses to find pigment sources. Remember that deer pericardium? That iron hearth in the middle of Earth? Primal senses are akin to activities of the heart, not the eyes. I revere stones as gurus (from Sanskrit guru, “weighty, grave, elder, teacher”). There’s a devotional slowing down, an entering of dreamtime, not unlike falling in love, that’s involved in pigment foraging.

Goethite iron hydroxide being broken down into pigment, aka soil-forming.

Visioning overrides the isolation of the merely visual. My imaginal body gets involved, because I engage with scales and time zones completely nonhuman and obtuse to me. In a way, I have to believe I myself am rock. These somewhat deranged, fantastical, senses of being-ore engage multivalent layers of sensation simultaneously—metallurgical empathy, geological intuition, geographic dowsing, textural sensitivity, unusual temporal and physical magnitudes.

When I engage in these acts, suddenly the land shifts, and I feel an impulse to move towards a certain creek bed, down a path, closer. As I descend towards the ground, slowly the Earth seems to hum. Small hard ores reach out, like hands reaching back. I pick up a crumbly little chunk and rub it against another rock—a golden ray of a particular yellow emerges, an indication of iron hydroxide ochre. Thus, imagination and feral wonder become necessary and supportive, down-to-earth, technical skills. Sedimentary process takes the lead. Land communicates with me as sediment, sensually, in my body, from my prelingual marrow, my inner soils.

What is the mineral impulse in this landscape? And how is it mirrored in the impulses I feel in my body? What does it feel like to be on this soil, in this place, with this landform, right now? What is exposed, shedding, available to touch? What is being conjured? Do I feel nervous, heavy, flighty, aroused, silly? Am I sentimental sediment? What does my organism want to do in the landscape? Run? Dig? Die? Often I have to spit or pee. This is eco-cultural information, information about being in expressive, receptive relationship.

Handling Common Ground

Let’s back up again: The most common pigment minerals are iron-based soils and stones. These are what I forage for primarily. Not only because they involve evolution, but because they are found everywhere on the surface of Earth, as common ground. They touch nearly everyone. These mineral forms include hematite, limonite, goethite (named after the natural philosopher, Goethe), magnetite, and other iron-rich material, including lateritic soils, vivianite, and ferromagnesian silicates. These minerals include various degrees of iron and oxygen and other minor elements. Hematite (iron oxide) comes from haima + lithos, “blood stone” or “stone that bleeds.” Hematite ore deposits are “veins that bleed red.”

Yet visually, their presence is largely unnoticed, unconscious even. When my eyes come across iron oxide hematite in the landscape, these stones may appear atonal, stone cold, metallic silver, dull gray, or banal brown—their inner spectral ecstasy hidden from visual perception.

Land pigments gathered from the sheddings of an Eocene landscape in British Columbia, Canada.

Rich color pigments may not reveal themselves until they’re ground up, touched, opened, allowed to breath. This act of oxygenation, of mineral breathing, conjures the primal root of art practice: “Etymologically and conceptually, ‘aesthetic’ harks back to the Greek aisthesis (to sense and perceive) and its deeper roots in the word aisthomai (to breathe in). This is also the meaning of the word inspire, or to be ‘full of the god,’” notes aesthetic philosopher Devon Deimler. Iron not only bleeds, but breathes. Gathering pigment thus invites aesthetic perception, and moreover, a form of aesthetic reception, a taking in of the Earth.

Aesthetic reception allows me to receive more beautifully, rather than make more. The iron in my body acts like a receptor of iron, isarnon, “holy metal,” iron to iron, oxygen to oxygen, pneuma to pneuma. Perhaps this situates me in a lineage of gnostic practitioners engaged in “mystic geography,” of those people who investigate imaginative presence, or “intimate taste” (dhawq). (See Henri Corbin’s Creative Imagination, 221–239, for more on this discussion.)

Perhaps what I am attempting to do is better described by a few lines from my friend Abraham Smith’s poetry in Destruction of Man (69):

the land sounds you
given a motioning over uneven and broached and breached
land farms you
touches you

Land touches you. Ochre, occurs (etymologically it “meets, appears, presents itself, comes into one’s mind”). Rocks embrace you, iron enters you. Iron, I yearn. There’s that slushy stuff again. A sensual, sedimentary yearning to touch and be touched by something utterly incomprehensible. Put another way, as Jane Bennet does, this is “the desire of the craftsperson to see what a metal can do, rather than the desire of the scientists to know what a metal is” (60).

I follow Bennett’s lead and consider what I am doing as a craftsperson desiring to know what a pigment can do. To me, pigment foraging, as a practice, informs the production of aesthetic experience, and elsewhere, creates objects of art, including human hearts and souls. Within that effort, I’m encouraged and inspired by the indication that aesthetic reception—how one takes in—matters more to co-directing human evolution then what one creates. Okkkkur.

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