Foraging for Color
In Audrey Louise Reynolds’s natural dye and design workshop, impermanence is the point.
Issue 08: “Out to Pasture” is presented by East Fork.
By Lila Allen
The walls at Audrey Louise Reynolds’s home in Warwick, New York—a small town in Orange County, not far from the New Jersey border—are hand-painted in chunky, irregular stripes, like a cartoon. Oversized, tulip-shaped pendants and floor lamps pepper the room. It’s a bit like the candy landscape at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but in her world, the medium is nature, not sugar: For the past two decades, she’s been brewing bespoke artisanal dyes from natural ingredients like flowers, fungus, and bark, and helping others do the same through consulting work.
If you want to view paradise, just look around and you’ll see it. From her land of pure imagination in Warwick, Reynolds grows, forages, builds, and brews batches of color, testing them on her walls and anything else she can get her hands on. Reynolds sells many of these items—T-shirts and sweatsuits, balaclavas—directly, as well as through retail partners. (Freakout Spot, the record store I run with my husband, stocks her hand-painted T-shirts and rolling papers—what she calls “smokeable paintings.”) She also advises brands—Nike, J. Crew, Eyeswoon, Repetto, The Elder Statesmen, and House of RoRo (who used her natural woodstain on its Iggy Chair)—on color, organically dyed products, and design. And, in a move that will allow her to extend her ethos to maybe its greatest scale yet, she’s also developing her own natural paint line, Weightless.
She landed here on the heels of a breakup a few years ago after two decades in New York City. But even in her early days in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Reynolds had an affinity for nature: She used to pilot her own boat across the East River into the city. I caught up with her recently, right as the winter was giving way to spring. What became clear through our conversation is that in the land of Reynolds, going out to pasture isn’t merely a retreat from city life: It’s integral to her practice and productivity.
You’re probably the closest to being a mad scientist of anyone I know. You are really doing experiments out there.
I really am, and as long as I can remember, I’ve been doing this. It’s just endless curiosity.
Is it dangerous?
No, pretty much everything I do is not dangerous. That’s the goal with everything. Back when I started all of this as my career, I was turning food reductions from a kitchen job into color. So I was seeing that, like, ‘Oh, if I make this red wine reduction, it becomes really concentrated. Or, if I take this green and boil it, it becomes a brighter green. And then if I add citric acid, it becomes even brighter green. And then if I apply cold water, it stops that moment in time.’ It was a journey of understanding the fullest potential of these colors that I could achieve.
It never made sense to be on a path of creating and harming myself and the planet—if there’s a constant issuance of stuff coming out of you, and you can’t help but do it, why not figure out a way to do it harmlessly? That’s why my journey is now like, ‘OK, I can’t really make enough T-shirts, or art, or stuff to support myself, but I would love to use my knowledge to support other artists, and create harmless products that fill a gap in the market.’ They can let people create in that same way, completely safely.
What does an average week look like for you, in terms of doing your own creative work, consulting, and sourcing—what’s the balance?
It’s a wild mixture. Right now, I’m doing a lot of development for a company, and that stuff won’t come out until 2028. It’s funny to always be designing for the future and filling this niche of where people’s brains will be later.
So my week involves me diving into color palettes and having lengthy conversations with big brands that want to have a pop of color, or have a bit of chaos within the confines of their product. That might be something like a pattern behind a Nike Swoosh, something I made in a crazy way. They can scan that in and put it in the background of something, or create a digital print.
If I find myself with extra time from working for the bigger, more commercial brands that feed me and pay my bills, I’m working on Weightless, my paint company. So then my day will transfer from commercial products and paying the bills into my passion product. If it’s really nice out, I’ll probably go make some shirts, or if I have leftover dyes or fresh-caught rainwater, I’ll turn those into pigments and make supplies to stock the shelves so that I have things to create with later. I make a lot of the things on my shelves myself.
I’m also in the garden—should the seasons provide—working on growing those things, hiking around, foraging.
When you’re consulting for the bigger brands, is it always in the universe of natural pigment and dye, or are you doing more general design and color consulting?
It’s a mix of both. A lot of companies gravitate towards the natural-dye aspect and the things I’m more well-known for, but they’ll see the price point, or realize that they’re not as UV safe and going to evolve over time, and they realize the product might need a disclaimer, or need to be hand washed.
One of the problems we have is the color changing over time. Let’s say you have this beautiful wash made out of cherry blossoms that are fermented and the most beautiful color you’ve ever seen. If you have light coming in from your window at a certain angle at one time of the day, it’s super hot, and it’s basically bleaching it out. You’re creating these moments that are beautiful, but also don’t necessarily last forever. So that’s always the first conversation with these companies: Do you need permanence, or are you okay with impermanence?
Are they comfortable with that impermanence?
The higher-end brands are. When I work with fast-fashion brands, they don’t understand the luxury price point that hand-dye requires. The easiest metaphor I’ve found is: Imagine going to the juice stand and ordering your $12 juice, but you need 20 of those to dye a pair of pants. The process becomes expensive quickly.
When companies are designing more high-end, high-quality products out of natural materials, people are typically going to take care of those better as well. So, if you have a cashmere sweater that I’ve dyed with something high-end, that material hides in the price point of luxury anyway, so it becomes more palatable. Plus, you’re not washing and abusing that product the same way.
In a lot of the homes I write about, unlacquered brass is such a desired thing. It’s meant to show the wear over time. You want the smudges and everything else, because it gives it this wonderful patina.
It’s my favorite thing in the world. You can’t calculate it. There are ways that you can accelerate it or change it—like with copper and salt water or something like that. But you can’t really know. It’s beautiful.
You mentioned having to predict where people will be in a few years. But I think what’s interesting is that a lot of what you’re talking about is actually ancient. It’s almost out-of-time thinking. How do you get yourself into that headspace? And are you paying attention to future forecasting?
I have to be constantly surrounded by things I find inspiring, whether that’s taking a journey to a cool museum or taking long walks in the woods. I contribute to a lot of those future forecasts, and I love doing consulting like that. But then at the same time, I’m not the sole source.
It’s really fun when you make what you consider a “new” color—the little color meter that shows you the closest related paint color or pigment that’s been named, and nothing comes up. But obviously it’s not actually yours—it all belongs to nature.
The theme of this issue of Wrong House is “Out to Pasture,” and there’s a lot of circling around going back into nature, and back to one’s roots. So I’m curious about your move to Warwick, because you were a fixture of Red Hook, Brooklyn, for a long time. What is your relationship with the city now?
Red Hook, Brooklyn, from 2000 to 2003 was the most fabulous, magical place, peppered with artists and descendants of longshoremen. There was this soulfulness, but also isolation—cabs wouldn’t take you there. There was a level of danger that was also delightful—like, a pack of wild dogs lived at the sugar refinery, and they roamed the neighborhood. It was the closest thing to the Wild West, but somehow, I had my boat there and I could drive it to the city. I had a little mooring ball, and I felt like some fucked-up pirate—I’d make art all day, walk out on the dock, take my boat and go. It was romantic and poetic, and it doesn’t exist anymore. Fairway moved in; IKEA moved in.
There were a lot of friends who stayed, but for me, it was gone, and I wanted to return to nature. I’d been in the city 20 years; I grew up in the city, but I’ve always felt a strong connection to nature and worked with it. I got up here and felt like a kid in a candy shop. All this stuff around me has a purpose—it could save my life or kill me, or take me on some wild adventure.
I was also going through a breakup, and there was an immense amount of healing going on. I was going on long walks and learning to identify things. It became a game where I set out to find stuff, but also turn my brain on to color—discovering something that was new to me, like Chlorociboria, which is a parasitic mushroom fungus. It takes over wood and turns it a blue-green color. I was using alcohol to wick the color off of it, and that was the beginning of my wood-stain test, and understanding that I can use these mushrooms to make a bright teal on wood. That was the beginning of me collecting a barn full of it, fermenting it, extracting it, and trying these different techniques to get it out and turn it into something viable. It’s quite a challenge, but it’s an authentic offering from me.
You’ve been experimenting with new kinds of homeware, too—lights and bat houses. I encountered one of your lights in the wild at the Methods of Assembly studio not long ago.
That makes me so happy, because that series came out of feeling trapped indoors—cold, frozen, experiencing seasonal depression, trying to go snowboarding, but like, it not being nice powder, or feeling like I’m old and going to break something. It’s just so much less fun. I started making them waiting for spring—waiting for these things to pop out and bloom. And I was like, I’m just gonna make these rudimentary things as an extension of drawings I made as a child, that my mother fostered. It was also a way of reliving my connection to my mom. She’s getting older, so I’m looking back with gratitude and appreciation for the times that she could have scolded me and changed my whole path, but she lifted me up.
Well on that note, it’s finally spring. What are you foraging at the moment?
The magnolia blossoms that are everywhere—I don’t know if you’ve experienced those, but they break apart like an endive, and they taste like cardamom. They’re safe to eat, and delicious. Every salad or water I’m having has forsythia or cherry blossom or something cute that is coming up right now. But it still feels a little early. My lilacs are coming in, my hyacinth is too. The hellebores are rampant. I don’t know if there will be another frost after this, but knock on wood, next Tuesday looks like the day I’m gonna start planting everything I’ve got inside, and moving everything out into the garden. ⌂
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.