Brooke Toczylowski did not have to search far for the ingredients that were part of her demonstration to students in a printmaking class on Tuesday, October 29. Her work is about what surrounds us, and she used plants and weeds gathered from Loomis Chaffee property to make the demonstration prints.  

She also used some of her natural inks, including one she made from the pokeberry plant, the color of which blended vibrant red, purple, and mauve. Ms. Toczylowski is an artist in residence this week at Loomis and is working with some classes.  

This week in residence is what she terms “a gift.” A longtime educator as well as artist, she gets to devote this week to working with young people and finishing pieces to be included in her thesis work. She is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Clark University, and her thesis show will be in January at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass. 

“To have space and time away from everyday life is critical for an artist,” Ms. Toczylowski said. “To be able to pause your other activities and be able to focus is really the greatest gift for an artist.” 

The gift for the students? A print made right before their eyes, transforming what they might see around the Loomis property into beautiful art, striking in color, made from natural ink. 

“Something I would always hope young people take from seeing an artist do what they do is that it is really engaging and really intellectually stimulating,” Ms. Toczylowski said. “For me it is all about my intellectual curiosity and questions, and as long as I make something, even if I don’t like it, it always produces another set of questions that I immediately feel excited to pursue. So it is a really enriching activity to be able to follow your curiosity as an artist.” 

Her interest in plants was heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Her family moved from California to Connecticut in 2020. She had left friends behind, and the pandemic limited access to the outside world. She started gardening in the spring, and four years later she uses part of a community garden — what she calls her “dye” garden — to grow plants from which she makes natural ink. 

“This is going to sound corny in a way, but I found a bit of comfort and community and friendships from the plants,” Ms. Toczylowski said. “So, I started learning and reading — tons of research. All artists are different, but in my work I spend a lot of time reading and writing and researching.” 

Within a 20-minute conversation she mentioned five books, from Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer to Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking by Jason Logan and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abrams. The Abrams book brings up the idea of plant sentience, the ability of plants to sense and respond to all that is around them.  

Through her reading, Ms. Toczylowski has come to feel that humans are part of, not more important than, our ecological surroundings. She invokes Indigenous culture and wisdom to explain. “In English we use an ‘it’ pronoun for a hill or a plant, but in many North American Indigenous languages, there is a pronoun of ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’ that is used, so that really engages your mindset around how that entity shows up in your life and you do treat it differently. You treat it with more respect." 

A red amaranth plant gave her a chance to put this respectful approach into practice. She had asked herself if, instead of controlling all the space in her portion of the community garden, “what would it look like for me to take a secondary position and learn from what was already there?” And one day up popped a red amaranth. She had not planted it; a seed had fallen there. As she is wont to do, she looked into the history of the plant, and she has used the ink in her recent work.  

By the way, the plant is now six feet tall, she said. All from a seed that she did not plant. But what that plant did do — besides offering a practical use with its red ink — was to plant a seed in her to research the history of the plant before simply using it. In doing so, she kept true to one of the tenants of her work, “the historical layer,” she said. 

Ms. Toczylowski’s visit was part of the Adolf and Virginia Dehn Visiting Artist Program.