Make Video Series Features Atlanta Indigo Fine Craft Artist Lynn Pollard

>> I'm Lynn Pollard and I've been a maker virtually my entire life. I had a needle in my hand at 8, and after moving to Atlanta after graduate school, I became a fiber artist, mostly doing weaving. But now I dye paper. >> The paper museum at GA Tech was teaching a class in Japanese paper making. They announced at the beginning of the class that we had to have a project at the end of the week. And so we were sort of agonizing over it. I suddenly thought, "you know, I've got that indigo vat in the backyard". I put the paper, the notepaper in the indigo vat, and when I pulled it out, it was glorious. >> After that, I dipped hundreds of cards, experimenting, learning how the dye worked, learning how I didn't want the dye to work, learning that I didn't want a perfect vat, I wanted a vat where the chemistry was a little off. Learning how to make shapes, so it all started from that. >> Indigo is one of the few natural dyes that will do this. It's the one that dyes just because you put the paper in there, it's the one that gives you extra marks, it gives you foam, it gives you things to work with. >> The wonderful thing about what I'm doing now is that it combines sort of both sides of my background, I have the science from GA Tech, I get to do the chemistry in the vats, and yet that old liberal arts side is coming out in allowing myself to be open to what comes out of the vat, to guiding it, surrendering to serendipity, it's my way of writing poetry. >> I'm Lynn Pollard, and I make art by dipping paper into indigo