From Organic Materials to Site-Responsive Art Practice

How My Work with Organic Materials Led to a More Research-Based and Multidisciplinary Approach

"Posidonia" Seagrass Flowers in the Mediterranean Sea, Greece

For years, I worked with natural pigments out of a desire to return to something essential, natural, and unprocessed. I ground soils, boiled roots, stirred ash into binders as a form of reverence. Painting, for me, was never just about the image. It was a material conversation: slow, tactile, elemental.

But over time, the pigments began asking deeper questions.

Where did this chalk come from?

What does it mean to extract it?

What landscape am I carrying onto the canvas — and what is left behind?

What had started as a gesture of reconnection became a practice of listening. In recent years, I began to feel that using natural materials was not enough if I didn’t also consider their context, their geological aspect, their resistance. My work began to shift, from studio-based painting with natural pigments, to a site-responsive process rooted in research, ecology, and place.

Painting with the Landscape

Rather than collecting pigments and bringing them into the studio, I started returning to the places they came from. I no longer wanted to paint a landscape; I wanted to paint with it. To let itself, its textures, and temporalities shape the work.

This shift wasn’t just material, it was methodological.

I began researching the geologies of specific sites. Reading their histories, sensing their rhythms, walking their boundaries. The works became less about representation, more about relation.

A Multidisciplinary Language

There are also been another shift recently. As painting began to open up, it no longer needed to be the sole container for what I wanted to explore. Field recording, photography, video, writing... all became part of a broader vocabulary.

I have not abandoned painting, I simply expanded it. I now see it as one of several tools in a process led by context, not medium.

My current practice brings together research, embodied observation, and dialogue with place. I approach each site with questions. I let the materials guide the form, the limitations guide the language. Sometimes what emerges is a painting; other times it’s a sound piece, a map, a silent trace in the earth.

A Practice of Situated Care

This evolution has taught me that art can be a form of situated care.

To work with the earth is not only to make—it’s to attend, to notice, to ask for permission. The use of natural materials now feels less like a resource and more like a responsibility. Each project becomes an encounter—with place, with time, with what cannot be fully controlled.