Mother, maker, and the art of grief

An Indigo Summer by Ellie Evelyn Orrell

My maternal grandfather was a gentle man, deliberate in thought and speech, almost impossibly slow to anger. He was a smallholder, gardener, woodworker. He taught me to ride a bicycle and surprised me with the scope of his knowledge whenever my child’s mind forgot that he had not always been just Grandad, but had lived a life before, a life with another kind of glamour to that circumscribed by January pruning, October harvests and the arching, brittle damson trees with their dark blue fruit in the Kent orchards that I loved. He was small when I knew him, nut-brown with weather and nicotine, blue-eyed and crinkly-haired, carrying always the piquant scent of wood smoke and Golden Virginia rolling tobacco — a Russet apple of a man and the only grandfather I really had, and this for nothing like long enough, late child of a late child that I am. I think of him often and can remember certain things with absolute clarity, but just as much — perhaps more — about him has faded. I realise with a jolt that it is almost forty years since his death.

The words to make this brief portrait of him rose to the surface of my mind like iridescent bubbles in a dye vat after reading An Indigo Summer, Ellie Evelyn Orrell’s profound memoir of mourning and making, which came into my life completely by chance, appearing among results related ever more tenuously to the words I had typed into Blackwell’s search bar one day. Slim volume though it is, its serendipitous one hundred and fifty-something pages unfold into a world of meditative recollection, where even artist’s block is embraced as a sign that it’s time to re-evaluate and re-prioritise, to make bread or go for a walk. This is not a book for the impatient. But it is a book for anyone fascinated by pigments or by the form of brushstroke on paper, for foragers and cooks, for collectors and curators, and for those who seek to understand what drives creativity and the urge to make something with our own hands, all etched indelibly against the surrounding landscape of hills and beaches and a near-mythical Ynys Mon.

I know very little, if anything, about indigo. My understanding of this ancient colour does not extend behind the tiny, honeyed paint pan in my watercolour box. Yet, I have a feeling that its pigment will come to define the entire season ahead.

Ellie Evelyn Orrell

Superficially, An Indigo Summer is the author’s account of the season she spent dyeing cloth with her mother, artist Jeanette Orrell, in their cottage garden in Wales. But it is really about so much more. Intricate and involving, it examines the quality of making as medicine: the ways in which concentrating upon a creative process can act as a balm, its deep purpose helping to resolve our sharpest sorrows. It is an evocation of time spent in Japan and of Japanese pleasure in the imperfect, transposed triumphantly to a Welsh hillside. It is a brief, rewarding history of the deep blue plant-based dyes that have always held both spiritual and practical importance: woad and — most of all — indigo itself.

We had independently been trying to find our footing in a world without my grandfather. I had embarked on knitting a long, heavy scarf in rough black Shetland wool, now folded carefully into the bottom of one of the bags on the seat next to me. Meanwhile, my mum had been learning to cloak the world in the deepest blue.

Ellie Evelyn Orrell

Orrell’s book is saturated with one man’s lasting influence upon his daughter and granddaughter; a testament to the contribution of that man in shaping his successors’ lives and to the infinite small ways in which we are each woven, washed and coloured by our own parents and grandparents. Orrell enjoys a particularly close relationship with Jeanette, which means that she has felt her grandfather’s death all the more keenly, her own sense of loss amplified by that extreme emotional proximity. Page after page bears witness to strength and poise, gifts and loss, music and harmony rediscovered, artistry and craft, foraging and food, patient experimentation leading to intimate understanding. Indigo is pervasive, persuasive. I was filled with the urge to dye my entire wardrobe in its darkest blue, to imitate these women, to emulate on some level the pared-back state of grace I’d found here, the ‘processes which seem to suddenly slow the entire world around them.’ Orrell recalls lovingly a childhood surrounded by her mother’s creative output, so completely integrated into their lives that she came to see art and nurturing motherhood as mutually expressive, and compares Jeanette to the artists whose lives inspire and guide her, such as Barbara Hepworth, Sonia Delaunay and Leonora Carrington: women who continued to create and make during their own motherhoods. The method and intuition involved in Jeanette’s creative process, her slow gathering of materials and garnering of forms, imbue it with an unfailing allure. The gradual, steady progress that her daughter describes speaks to me. It is the steaming kettle, the resting dough, the hiraeth of home.

The changes are unsettling, not only inasmuch as they indicate a passing of time, but also in their representation of its speeding up.

Ellie Evelyn Orrell

For An Indigo Summer is also, in part, a bittersweet requiem for a Welsh country childhood lived among the loose collection of cottages and farms at Betws Gwerful Goch (‘the prayer house of Gwerful with the red hair’), a lost world of butcher’s van, baker’s van and unpredictable mobile library; of days cut off by snow and a coming-of-age dependence upon infrequent rural buses that I recognise only too well. It is a way of life closed to us, yet lingering, too. In the same way, dark blue at once endures — the only colour that exists within the Bayeux tapestry as the original embroiderers saw it — and is ephemeral. Hills are blue only when they are distant, out of reach, remembered. And whilst similar ancient resist-dyeing techniques evolved in countries as remote and diverse as Japan and Nigeria, linguistically there is no universal understanding of ‘blue’ on our blue planet.

The summer of indigo calls my attention to the invisible threads between artists’ everyday life and work … without making, without creative practices, healing is far more difficult — perhaps impossible.

Ellie Evelyn Orrell

Indigo is inherently therapeutic. Its antibacterial qualities were understood by the samurai, who used indigo-dyed cloth to line their armour against battle wounds, and indigo was incorporated into Japanese face masks as recently as 2020. Something of that medicinal astringency dwells in it symbolically, too. It seems to represent a cleansing, the repeated near-religious immersion of cloth into the dye vat at once colouring each fibre and offering a metaphoric washing-away of life’s complications. Indigo has power.

It is a power to which Orrell may be particularly susceptible, for nothing in her world is taken for granted. She finds just as much sensory experience in London’s coffee shops as in the palazzi of Florence. Individually and collectively, the objects that she and Jeanette collect on their regular walks in the woods and hills — flowers, stones, fir cones, seed heads — amass a potency of their own, emblematic of the ‘sense for the value of everyday things’ that mother and daughter have in common and mapping the beloved personal geography that they share despite now living far apart. As the indigo summer continues and foraging extends from food to dyestuffs, another layer of that geography is discovered, the map embellished by the unexpected colours that reside within familiar leaves, barks and berries. Orrell has a deep appreciation for her mother’s level of engagement with the world. Collecting brings focus. That focus extends to experimenting, learning, the fine-tuning of both practice and grief that is her arching theme, the spine that runs through this book.

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My recent reading has circled the same subjects over and over again, without any plan that it should do so. The nature of inheritance and belonging. Nature itself. Japanese culture. Wild swimming. The intention and habit of creativity. Loss and mourning. Each book I take up has seemed in some way a continuation, or elaboration, of the one before. I can attach the name shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, to the restorative, intense quiet joy that I gain from time spent in the woods, and respect the hawkish desolation that mantles over me whenever that escape is denied for too long. I comprehend (I think) the concept of ma, the emphasis of empty space, of absence. And I have come to recognise kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with seams of gold, in which the fault lines are celebrated as an intrinsic part of the whole, enhancing its beauty. As their summer of indigo drew to a close I saw Orrell and Jeanette as being likewise mended, their deepfelt loss transformed into the golden joinery that will always be part of them but is no longer a mark of destruction. Emotionally, materially, creatively — they had stored up a bounty to see them through the winter ahead.

An Indigo Summer gives voice to a remarkable eye. Its imagery and impact will stay with me, as slow to fade as the residual indigo that gloves a dyer’s hands. And more precious, colouring my life still more deeply, I have the revitalised remembrance of my own grandfather, a gentle echo, the indelible traces of his life tied to the landscape that he and I share, the love that was his due. And I am grateful for that.

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