Most of us will be familiar with pigments and dyes derived from rocks – ochre, lapis lazuli… – but maybe textile printing can help rescue polluted water.
This project, Crushing the Rocks, by Petra Vicianová, a textile designer and doctoral candidate in the textile department at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia, started with the simple technique of grinding rocks, mixing the resulting powder into a paste and then applying the paste to different fabrics to see what would happen. Along the way the process evolved to include minerals from other sources, including from water polluted by mining. These acidic mine waters are laden with heavy metals and colour the rivers into which they flow ochre. The designer tested schwertmannite, a mineral that is most likely to be found in the water, and found that it was possible to print using that mineral.
Most interestingly, the project was not undertaken to find a concrete scalable alternative to conventional printing. Rather it was an enquiry into the nature of textile printing, into the ways in which unusual sources of pigments can be exploited, about the ways in which people learn and the role of curiosity in finding solutions to some of the pressing problems the world faces.