Eco-printmaker Kristen McClarty trades in the currency of unique creative surprises via her Inyoni art-fabric range, which she hand-produces from plants found on the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain.
With today’s renewed emphasis on simplicity, durability and authenticity, Kristen McClarty’s eco-printing practice and product are as on-point as you could find. Kristen got to this by taking the long route. No art school or decades on a design team feature on her bio, but what does is a robust childhood in South Africa’s rural KwaZulu-Natal (1,800km and an entire ecosystem away from where she now lives), which taught her, among several other country-girl skills, to sew and to identify the plants and trees that grew abundantly around her. In contrast, this was followed by a high-powered 13-year stint in corporate law.
While she was super-fluent about fabric and flora from the get-go, where Kristen is now as a surface designer is as much a science as it is an art; as much about precision, chemistry and biology as it is about the more soulful stuff of documenting her time and place in her surroundings in a way that others, she hopes, can enjoy.
“My objective with my brand, Inyoni – the isiZulu word for bird, which was my dad’s nickname for me – was to produce wearable and usable art,” she explains. “The art part is the design element, the visualisation of a piece based on prior knowledge of how the foliage I find will transfer onto fabric. So it’s really about a look and feel I’d like to achieve, plus it is about registering or transferring memory onto a textile, and in that way it is completely different from any mechanical process.”
The science part turned out to be considerably more dicey, alchemic and experimental for Kristen. “There is very little written on the science, as opposed to the practice, of eco-printing. Each piece of fabric I make is botanically printed directly from the pigments intrinsic to the foliage. I don’t use inks, dye or chemicals. Nature does the work. There were a lot of eureka moments. You don’t know until you know.”
Having unlocked this mysterious process through initiative and time-intensive experimentation, Kristen is not about to dish on how you can DIY. After all, her product is not the method but what is expressed on the material. What she will tell you is that she doesn’t get her results by being an elite forager. Although the Cape Floral Kingdom – one of six unique floral kingdoms in the world and widely lauded for its extraordinary diversity of endemic species – is on her doorstep, her foraging is far from restricted to plant royalty. She picks indigenous fynbos, legally, in the suburban areas around her Kommetjie studio, but also uses kitchen scraps – like onion skin; alien plants such as peppermint willow (Agonis flexuosa), a native to Australia that features on the street verges of Kommetjie; and the bankrupt bush (Seriphium plumosum), which though indigenous tends to encroach aggressively wherever it’s planted. In fact, Kristen’s preferred picking grounds are gutters, plant dumps and the suburban paths and byways where plants have spilled over onto the public thoroughfare.
“The art part is the design element, the visualisation of a piece based on prior knowledge of how the foliage I find will transfer onto fabric”
“When I forage, I already have in mind a look and feel I’d like to achieve with a piece, so I scavenge for what I need. Perhaps the beautiful blombos (Metalasia muricata) in bloom or the thin straplike leaves of the invasive Port Jackson (Acacia siligna) that prints medium grey and slightly haphazard in structure. I particularly love the scribbled, needle-fine casuarina. To create depth in my pieces, I compose and juxtapose relative-strength pigments and foliage shapes, plus the negative space around the foliage and the general markings left on the fabric to create surface noise or detail. All this is on my mind when I forage for and execute a print.”
Kristen has gone from producing small-batch fabric lengths that she retails through several high-end Cape Town craft galleries to producing a homeware range of cushions, bed throws, tea towels and table napkins, available on her website. Her next venture is a collab with fashion designer Nadya Von Stein, whose bespoke range of hemp resortwear well fits the values Kristen is all about. For this, and her own growing range of textile prints for Inyoni, Kristen is determined to retain her bespoke approach but reach a wider fashion-focused audience that appreciates and champions small-batch big-time makers of wearable art.
