A local Northern Kentucky artist is creating plantable works of art with natural dyes and seed paper to be planted on a vacant site in Bellevue.
Bellevue resident Devan Horton received the Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Art as Activism grant and, with it, created botanical paints and homemade paper filled with pollinator seeds. She is inviting the community to create and plant paintings and transform the lot into a pollinator garden at an event on May 18.
The grant Horton received is to engage the public in art-related activism. Horton said she had already been experimenting with creating sustainable art, including seed paper, for years before getting the grant and knew that’s what she wanted to include in the project.
“So, I have been an oil painter most of my life, but that’s not very sustainable,” Horton said. “So, I’m trying to figure out how to make something sustainable.”
Horton said making the seed paper took trial and error over roughly two years.
“You have to do it really fast so that the seeds don’t germinate and start growing already,” she said. “Basically, I will screen my paper and add the seeds on top, kind of just gently pushing them in, and then let that dry. The first few times I did it, I was adding the seeds to the water and trying to do that fast, but they were germinating because they’re sitting in water.”
For the paint, Horton said she has been collecting regional items like walnuts and goldenrod and has purchased other plants like indigo.
“From those extra leftover dye vats, there’s a way that you can add alum and chalk to that and kind of filter it out and turn it into a fine powder,” she said. “You add a watercolor medium to that, and you can make paints from those dyes. So, it’s all completely non-toxic.”
The art-making event is on May 18 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The site is at the end of Grandview and Washington Avenues, a dead-end street. Horton said the land used to house a community garden and receives good light for plants.
Horton is creating a prompt that tells people to paint and plant a piece of themselves or a piece of home, but people can choose to paint whatever they want. She said she decided on that prompt because feeling connected to a plot motivates them to keep caring for that plot.
Roebling Books and Coffee in Dayton is supporting the event by bringing a collection of books, coffee and iced tea for visitors.
“We are new to the area; we just had our one-year anniversary party, so this was actually the first opportunity where somebody from the community has reached out to us and invited us to be a part of it,” Jaiden Bolin with Roebling Books and Coffee Dayton said. “So, of course, we jumped at the opportunity because we’ve been wanting to find ways to interact with the community outside of our doors. We are thrilled to do anything that involves things for kids or aspiring artists. That’s exactly what Roebling stands for.”
Horton said Roebling’s involvement will allow people to hang out and get cozy. They will also have live music at the event.
Horton said the Kentucky Foundation for Women will continue to fund her, and she plans to make more meadows in other vacant areas in the future.
“These are all going to be perennial seeds,” Horton said. “So, I’m hoping that I can collect the seeds from this lot and keep taking them to other places. So that’s the larger goal of all of this.”
