Tilke Elkins:
Records of Being Held

form & concept | September 2022

“Pigments are living collaborators. I paint on wild surfaces, with mineral and botanical pigments originating in the sites where I work,” writes Tilke Elkins. While the Oregon-based artist’s latest series will appear in a gallery space, the show is a visual and tactile conduit to the places where she gathers materials and creates artwork. In Records of Being Held, Elkins presents three large-scale, double-sided foraged mineral pigment paintings; a collection of single-ply shadow paintings that are the result of many visits to remote areas by the Whilamut/Willamette River; and wild pigment-imbued leaves.

Elkins writes, “Countering the tradition of ‘capturing’ a landscape through the formal distillation of its visual beauty, these records are instead offered as temporary collaborative performances with materials—conjunctions that will dissolve and evolve.”

In an unconventional approach to the dynamic between an artist and her collectors, the pigments of each work in Records of Being Held will eventually be reclaimed by the artist and other members of the pigment community and ritually returned to the sites where they were gathered. Individuals interested in participating in this painted performance can ceremonially activate the works by offering financial support for communities in ancestral relationship with the land where the pigments were found.

A portion of sales proceeds will benefit the Kommema Cultural Protection Association, an organization led by Kalapuya elder Esther Stutzman, currently rematriating an area of ancestral Kalapuya lands in the region where these pigments were gathered, and the Wild Pigment Project Equitable Opportunity Fund.

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