Sustainability

When entering the art world, I was shocked to discover how much waste the industry creates so my goal is to make my practice 100% waste free to show other artists, especially printmakers, that it is possible.

Here are a few things I am doing to achieve this goal:

Making my own paper

I do not know about you, but I have so much excess paper, whether it is from test prints or old assessments from school, there is just too much… So why not turn this into new sheets of paper? It is a straightforward process, and you can make different colours and achieve different textures super easily. And better yet, it is virtually free once you have all the right equipment. So why not reuse those test prints to make more paper for more test prints.

I also plan to make my business card out of my homemade paper. To do this all you need to do is get stamps created with everything you need on cards, cut out your paper to size, and stamp it on. It takes a bit of time, but I think it is a really cute idea, means you can customise some cards and change the colour of them, plus it gives it a nice personal touch to something that can feel quite

Saving water

I really hate using oil-based ink to print because it is super annoying to clean up unless you have the chemicals. Instead, I use a water-based ink which cleans up super easily and I can recycle the inky water to colour my homemade paper. All I do is soak some old paper in the water for a few days, so it picks up the pigment and viola, you have a beautiful coloured piece of paper made from the ink you did not use while printing.

Shipping

For shipping, I protect the prints by putting them in to a compostable bag which will then be wrapped in paper and lastly put in a paper bag or box for shipping. All of these are perfect for a home compost. The shipping company I am using have a goal of being net zero by 2050, they are reducing their carbon emissions and are turning soft plastics into fence posts. Read more about it here: https://www.nzpost.co.nz/about-us/sustainability

Trees

I do not believe in cutting down a beautiful tree that I think might have interesting rings, I prefer to source mine through people who have had a tree fall in their backyard or have taken down the tree because it was becoming dangerous. This means that most of the time, I have no idea what the rings are going to look like. But I love it because it is always something different and unique.

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If you have any more ideas on how I can make my practice even more sustainable, please let me know :))