Artist Joanna Fowles coaxes colour from nature, foraging barks, roots, and foliage local to her studio to create natural colour palettes. The limited-edition series 'Coffee Codes,' and ‘Coffee Totems’ presents artworks hand painted with mordants and dyed in repurposed coffee waste from local cafe waste streams. Each code is a unique piece that is intended as a contemplative reflection on nature.

Coffee Codes Totems highlight the untapped potential of everyday materials commonly discarded, such as spent coffee grounds. Choosing waste materials as alternative dye sources reflects a conscious decision to explore the possibilities of overlooked materials and discover their colour potential. Coffee Code Totems provides a tangible representation of circular changemaker practice centred on resourceful and waste-reducing methods to source colour. The artist echoes contemporary changemaker sentiments, recognising the existing flaws in our supply chains and industrialised systems, feeling a pull to provide solutions and alternatives to waste and petroleum-based dyes. Identifying local waste streams, such as coffee waste from a local cafe. Coffee Code Totems emphasises the significance of applying circularity through a local lens, particularly within industries like the restaurant sector, which often produce significant waste. The artist is influenced by minimalism and the colourists Josef Albers and Anni Albers, alongside textile colour swatch books and the ubiquitous colour reference guide for designers, the Pantone swatch books. These influences lead to minimal blocks or codes of colour in the artist’s practice. Each totem explores, in a minimal geometric graphic format, rectangles of varying scales hand-painted with a mordant of varying strengths. The resulting dyed codes reveal a range of elephant greys, peachy tones and browns explored in different compositions and ratios. The work suggests that innovative solutions can emerge from unexpected sources with an opportunity to intervene, rethink and utilise waste from industrial food supply chains.

Image top to bottom Coffee Code 1,2,& 3

Dimensions: 48.5x48.5cm (approx)

Organic cotton canvas hand painted with mordants and dyed in coffee waste