Plancestors: Botanical Dye Gathering

Workshop in collaboration with WOMEN OF BANGLATOWN

Plancestors is a community-based art and learning project exploring botanical dyes, cloth, and cultural textile traditions through shared meals, storytelling, and collaborative making.

Developed in partnership with Women of Banglatown in Hamtramck, the project brings together women and girls to explore natural dye practices rooted in relationships to land, memory, and cultural inheritance. Through gathering local plants and clay, making pigments, dyeing cloth, and sharing stories, participants engage in a collective process of creating color from the landscapes they inhabit.

The project is grounded in my ongoing exploration of reciprocal healing between body and earth through practices of care, touch, and sensuous repair. Drawing inspiration from Iranian and Bengali textile traditions—including kilim weaving, natural dyeing, and Pattachitra painting—Plancestors considers how cloth can carry stories across generations and how plant-based color can serve as a vessel for memory, identity, and belonging.

Participants are invited to contribute their own cultural knowledge, family histories, and creative practices, positioning them as both learners and teachers within the process. Together, we explore questions such as:

What colors belong to a place?
What knowledge is carried through textiles and handwork?
How might gathering, making, and sharing create deeper relationships with one another and the land?

Over a series of workshops, participants learn ethical harvesting practices, experiment with botanical and mineral pigments, create resist-dyed textiles, and contribute to a collective installation created from the materials gathered. The resulting works serve as both archive and offering—honoring the land, the labor of making, and the stories woven throughout the process.

Plancestors is an invitation to slow down, gather together, and remember our relationships to place through color, cloth, and collective care.