The majority of natural dyes are vegetable dyes from plant sources –roots, fruits, vegetable scraps, bark, leaves, and wood. Blue colourants around the world were derived from indigo dye-bearing plants.

Batik is a method of dyeing cloth that traditionally uses a manual wax-resist dyeing technique. The resist is formed when liquid wax is applied to cloth. The cloth then has to be dyed with cold dye, because traditional hot dye melts the wax. For that reason, since the development of synthetic dyes, Indonesian batik production has become somewhat of an ecological nightmare: chemical dyes are easy to use but their discharge and surplus is still being thrown into waterways.

In this experimental workshop, Naomi Stevenson will demonstrate how natural dyes can be used, cold, in the batik process whilst still being colour fast. We’ll work mainly with indigo, and walnut. We'll start with walnuts which have been boiled in a cast iron container. This method plays on the tannins in the walnut husks to create an iron-tannate solution similar to gall inks, which then produces very dark brown or black ink. We'll demonstrate the making of the dye as well as the batik method.

We believe it to be a world first - even the Clean Batik Initiative, a groundbreaking 4-year (2010-2013) programme implemented by the German – Indonesian Chamber of Industry and Commerce (EKONID) to clean up the batik industry in Indonesia, doesn’t use natural dyes - it merely seeks to limit the overuse of synthetic ones and to limit the harmful disposal of waste. And whilst we understand that disposal of natural dye can cause environmental problems, the environmental degradation of huge areas of the world’s coastline in the region of denim factories is authority for the proposition that the disposal of synthetic dyes and associated mordants is many thousands of times worse.