sappan wood

Warm-up: The Journey begins

| msvarnyk

Sun, Mar 17, 3:00 pm

I’m starting this journal of my experience and relationship with my craft of egging – this is how in the egging community we colloquially call our Egg Batik or traditional (sometimes semi-traditional) craft of wax resist on eggs, in Ukrainian tradition it is called pysanky (when referring to the objects – the decorated eggs) or pysankarstvo (when referring to the tradition).

Within the context of the MA in Folkloristics and Applied Heritage studies which I started in September at the university of Tartu, what I am doing here in this journal is called auto-ethnography. But I don’t quite know yet what that means other than the obvious – observing and recording my own experiences in the ethnographic manner with the methods of social anthropology, or something like that. 

I have a method I will follow though, and I am bringing it from my previous life as a philosopher, more specifically, as a phenomenologist. The method is called body hermeneutics, and it has been created by my philosophy teacher, Sam Mallin, based on the philosophies (both as theory or conceptual framework and as practice) of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. I am listing them in a counter-chronological way, because it would be probably fair to say that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has contributed most to the method itself, and Nietzsche’s the least, if one were to assess it by “content”. However, this order of listing them also reveals the lineage, because Merleau-Ponty was studying Heidegger and being influenced by till the last year of his (Merleau-Ponty’s) life, and Heidegger, or course, has been studying Nietzsche, even though at some point around WWII he seems to distance himself from Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s metaphysics. 

<This into is becoming too long, am I avoiding the plunge?>  Sam used these type of brackets in his own notes to indicate hyper-reflections, especially of this somewhat critical type.

Briefly about the method – I have to say this, because this will not be a solely private text, it will become public. The method in based on the description of a situation that has a hold on us (in this case my situation is the practice of egging, the doing of the craft of egg batik, but it can be any situation, as long as it captures us sufficiently for us to stay in it). The description is done by feeling out and describing our experience through the four “regions” (Merleau-Ponty) of our phenomenological body (perceptual, motor-practical, social-affective, and cognitive). We describe both how the situation (including things and phenomena participating in the situation) is/feels/appears to us (through our bodily regions), as well as how the situation influences and adjusts the functioning/style/attitude of our capacities themselves. This all sounds very theoretical, but to give an example, we describe both how something looks to us, as well as how what we are looking at influences our vision. Still abstract, but it will have to do in the intro, and hopefully some examples will follow eventually.  We circle through the descriptions repeatedly, and eventually we get somewhere, we learn something about the situation, though often not immediately, not in the first few sessions. It is a cumulative sort of process.

Sam suggested three major steps to go through each time we do the work.

1) sketch out questions – what are the things we are wondering about as we are starting today’s phenomenological journey. The questions can be of different kinds – from specific questions about this specific “project”, to more general questions, and even more general questions, to specific questions that might seem unrelated to the project, but still are somehow in our side view.

Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to have a bit of a break or change of place between step 1 and step 2.

2) do a round of observation or “silent descriptions” of how the situation works – feel out the situation without writing anything down. 

3) write out the descriptions systematically, follow up of the insights that might have presented themselves in step 2, work through all 4 regions if possible. When stuck or even when not stuck, a good strategy is to explore a region that seems least relevant or least engaged in the situation, though if that doesn’t work, then start from anything that works. 

If one has a lot of time to do the work, one will keep switching between steps 2 and 3, as one writes something out and then needs to take time to feel out without writing, or sometime to re-attune oneself to the situation. Sometimes one will take breaks, and usually one will not go back to step 1 even after a break, unless one feels that would be useful.

My process of writing eggs is such that I cannot write on the eggs and write notes simultaneously, but I do have periods when the egg is in the dye and I have to wait for it, so maybe that will work just fine.

So enough of avoidance, here I go.

(3:45 pm) Questions

  1. Start with the most difficult and the ultimate for me: What is my relationship with the eggs, and with the egging, with the research of the tradition, and the “experiments” I will need to do? Who am I in this: the researcher, the crafts person, the egger, the dyer, the scientist (???), the anthropologist or the ethnologist, the philosopher/phenomenologist (permanently so?)?  Or maybe a Ukrainian, a human, a woman? Or something else? How do these different options and roles change my attitude, or my treatment, my involvement with the eggs/egging? And then the other side of the relationship: what is this egging and these eggs? (I am already refusing to use any of the typical categories – craft, folk art, artefact, even the generic “thing” and opting for an everyday colloquial word that doesn’t even exist in that same way in Ukrainian – what does this tendency or preference of mine mean, how does it affect my relationship, and what affects this tendency in my existing relationship?)
  2. Ukrainian identity, language, history, tradition, current war – how do all these influence my relationship with egging and eggs, and through which bodily regions? Social affective to some degree, cognitive also? How do I feel about this thing being Ukrainian? What are the mixed feelings, what are the seeming contradictions? In what ways do I want to claim the Ukrainianness, and in what ways do I want to avoid it or bracket it?
  3. The motor region – the rhythm and pace, and the manifestation of that through the sound of egging – the stylus on the egg, the dunking in the dye, all that. How do those reflect my initial mood/emotional attitude, how do they change as I work on it (work? Is that what I will be doing and what does that mean, which meanings of “work”)?
  4. The usual anxieties and/or excitements about a new project. What are they, how do they manifest themselves, how are they the reflection of my more general values, needs, desires, passions?

I think that’s more than enough to start. I’m itching to do it, so here I go. 

(4:03pm)

I am not including my notes in this post, the notes need to mature, both as they are written, and also some distance needs to be developed between the written note an me, some time needs to pass to let the notes become the notes, solidify in time, something like that. I might even post the whole notes of this first day or parts of them later, but it is too early to do it now. Or so I feel today.

But I will include the photos of the egg, most of which (except the final background color) was completed on that first day.

This is an egg from Vira Man’ko’s The Ukrainian Folk Pysanka, table 4-17, Lviv region. For some unknown reason I often start my season with this egg, it’s a warm-up egg for me. Yellow is coreopsis with alum, red is sappan wood with alum, the black initially was not working, so I etched it back to white and did a few dips into logwood with alum. Technically, it’s dark purple, but looks almost black. There stylus was new, the egg shell did not cooperate very well, so there are several issues visible on the egg, but for a warm-up it’s OK.

What I have been up to

| msvarnyk

A LOT has happened in the last three months.

First of all I have started my MA in Folkloristics and Applied Heritage Studies at the University of Tartu in Estonia in September, and that has been a demanding but also extremely fulfilling work-out. I love the feel of this place, the city, as well as the program, and the people, and I feel surprizingly comfortable here, even though adjusting to the daily life in a new country is quite energy consuming.

At the end of October – beginning of November I went to DHA42 – Dyes in History and Archaeology conference in Copenhagen and presented there on what we know (and don’t know) about the historic uses of natural dyes on eggs in what is now Ukraine. That whole conference was an amazing experience, from all kinds of angles, and I don’t know whether I will have a chance to write about it, but I do have some notes (and a report I submitted to my program), so who knows, maybe at some point I will find time.

To give a bit more of a visual context for my conference presentation, I made a few eggs, based on the images in late 19th century ethnographic texts, of which there are several, and in my presentation I focused on three of them: one text (sort of an extended article) by Sumtsov, and two egg pattern catalogues (Kulzhynskyy and Korduba) also with significant textual descriptions. I dyed the eggs with the natural dyes mentioned in the texts, or close substitutes where the originally used dyes were not available, and here you see a photo of the egg I made on the background of the page in the contemporary reprint of the old catalogue.

This one was dyed yellow with the apple wood chips with alum, then red in Mexican cochineal with alum (as a replacement of Porphyrophora polonica, an insect dye native to Ukraine and other parts of Europe, which, unfortunately, is not commercially available any more), and then black with sappan wood with iron (again, as a replacement of brazilwood, which was not available for me to buy when I was living in Canada, but now that I am in the EU, I can buy it, and, in fact, it has just arrived from Germany). I also dyed some other eggs red with sappan wood with alum, and some black with logwood with iron.

Now that I have brazilwood, I will try using it for the first time (though not sure when because dyeing is quite a venture in my tiny kitchenette), and see how it works, both with alum and with iron. I am supposing that it should give similar colors as sappan wood, that is, red with alum and black with iron. Technically it might be possible to achieve some other colors or shades with acidity modifiers, but I don’t really need anything I could get from them other than red or black for my current “historical reenactment” purposes. If brazilwood works, I will be one step closer by not having to use the red “replacement” dye, and instead being able to use what is actually listed in the 19th century sources, even though it is (and was) an import dye.

Strangely, madder is not mentioned in any of the Ukrainian historical sources I have seen so far. So unless I can find some evidence of it having been used historically (even if on fibres rather than eggs), locally as a dye (not just in imported fabric dyed somewhere else), I can’t say that it was used, which again reduces my range of potentially local reds.

The only known local source of red then would be Porphyrophora polonica, the status of which is currently unclear. It hasn’t been cultivated (or harvested) in Ukraine for at least a hundred years, possibly longer, and has probably suffered heavily from pesticides, so it appears to be extinct in Ukraine. However, it’s not easy to encounter unless you are looking for it specifically (it lives underground and only comes out once a year), and I’ve heard, it has been spotted somewhere in Poland recently, so there is hope. Of course, from spotting it to feeling free to kill some, is probably a journey of at least a few decades, if everything goes well and they are happily multiplying (and you need to kill a bunch, even though a smaller bunch for egg dyeing than what you would need for fabrics). And then, of course, the technological question of making the dye from the bugs is not exactly an easy one. Something else to explore is potential uses of Porphyrophora polonica in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, maybe Azerbaijan) where it does still occur in nature, but it is not clear whether it is actually used as a dye, rather than being replaced with imported Mexican cochineal.

This particular egg pattern is from Kulzhynskyy’s catalogue (Plate X), it comes from the village Verlok, now in Zhytomyr oblast. The name of the village used to be Vyrlook – sounds like a name of a mythological fantastic creature, about which I knew nothing till I googled. The village used to belong to Kyiv governorate at the end of 19th century, it is about 100km from Bucha, about 80km from Borodyanka, and about 85 km from Mriya on Zhytomyr highway where Russian military killed at least 27 Ukrainians and injured 5 more, most of whom were trying to escape occupation westward between 3 and 25 March 2022. (You can read a report about this, also in English, superbly done by Texty.)

Part of my reason for choosing which eggs to write was in trying to write the eggs from the regions of Ukraine more affected by this war. I also wrote an egg from Kherson region (which I’m not happy with, so I’ll write it again, possibly several times, and then will show it to you). I was looking for the eggs from Chernihiv area, but so far have not identified the ones I wanted to write because all of them in Kulzhynskyy’s catalogue have green, and I am not yet quite happy with the green I have managed to achieve with natural dyes so far. This same reservation applies to a number of eggs from north-east, east, and south of Ukraine.

Another reason I chose this egg was because it is a bit unusual. It is not very common for the flowerpot motif to have this geometric star-flower, rather that some less geometric flowers. It is also not very common for the start-flower to have protruding lines, which make it look less like a flower, and more like a star shaped straw ornament. So for me this egg, while still being quite within tradition, also has its own quirks, its own character, which makes it fun to write.

I am now trying to figure out what exactly I want to do for my MA project, due in roughly a year and a half, in case it remains a project, rather than a thesis. We have two options, writing a “classic” thesis, or making more of a hands-on project accompanied by a paper (much shorter than a thesis would be). I am a bit worried that I will not have enough space to write what I need, in case I opt for a project, however, doing a project would be pushing myself out of my academic comfort zone, and that is probably a good thing. There are some other options I could think of, to sneak in additional text as part of a project, maybe that is what I am going to do, let’s see.

Apple wood chips

| msvarnyk

Both Kulzhynsky (1899) and Korduba (1899), when reporting on the use of natural dyes on eggs in what is now Ukraine, talk about wild apple tree bark as the main and most common source of the yellow dye. I have not seen anyone anyone using apple on eggs in the present time, so when I saw that Botanical Colors had some on sale, I just had to buy some and try. These are “wood chips” of apple tree, and I don’t know how similar or different it is from the “wild apple tree bark” reported by the classics, but it’s the closest we have at this point.

I used a simple method – covered the chips with demineralized water, soaked for a while (one or two days), then simmered for a while (probably about half and hour), added a pinch of alum, strained and used. The dye works rather slowly, but gives a very pleasant result, closer to what in the egging community is referred to as “gold”.

Here is the range on tone from the same dye, with a white egg on the left for comparison:

And here are the same eggs with wax removed, bottom left over-dyed with cochineal, bottom middle dipped in iron water, and bottom right with sappan wood:

All eggs are traditional Lithuanian patterns from this book.

I will be dyeing more with apple wood chips!

LAST WEEKS’ LITHUANIAN EGGS

| msvarnyk

It’s been rather difficult for me to find inspiration for eggs, with war and all that looming the background, so I’m glad that “Pysanky Toronto 2023” that’s starting in a few days has forced me to make some for the Lithuanian eggs workshop I’m teaching there.

All of these are attempts to copy traditional Lithuanian patterns, for some of them there are several takes of the same pattern. 

There were three yellow dyes: apple wood chips (that I’ve never tried before, but that seems to be one the the most traditional yellow dyes in Ukraine), dyer’s chamomile, and some of our home grown last year’s coreopsis. Of the reds there was an old cochineal extract dye, which I’m surprised still worked, and I cannot remember when I made it, must have been for the natural dyes for Ukraine fundraiser last year. The second red dye was sappan wood which this time didn’t cooperate too well neither in the wood chips, nor in the extract form. All dyes were with alum, and the two greenish eggs were dipped into iron water after the yellow dye.

I will probably make another post or a couple eventually, showcasing at least the apple chips, but maybe other dyes individually as well.

I’m starting a new page in my egg adventures in September, so there will most likely be more frequent posts, in fact, I will probably add a personal blog page somewhere here to document my other-than-egg explorations and experiences.

Last two weeks

| msvarnyk

Made some more eggs, some were attempts to copy Lithuanian drop-pull eggs, while others were inspired by Lithuanian patterns. A number of dyes – two of coreopsis (extract and fresh), elderflower (dried), sappan wood, madder, saskatoon berries (frozen), I think that’s it though I might have forgotten something. Mainly with alum, one egg had sappan wood with iron on background.