< EVENTS
Elisabeth Viguie-Culshaw
From Plants to Prints, the Colourful Life of a Botanical Artist
A talk and demonstration on making prints on paper or fabric
Wednesday, September 16 • 4 PM – 6 PM
Elisabeth Viguie-Culshaw is a French born Eco artist living and practicing in Scotland. Trained as a conservation stencil artist by the University of Glasgow and Christie’s in the 1990’s, she spent a life time looking at faded pigments on walls.In 2015 she decided to explore natural dyes out of a personal interest and came across the botanical work of Australian artist India Flint on wool. As her own interest was working on paper, and not much was available in that subject, she started testing using her own mordanting recipes and local plants. She fell in love and never worked on a wall again.
In her talk, Elisabeth will explain her artistic journey. Due to a lack of available guidance or methods, she began by making “Brown” prints and has now progressed to creating beautiful, colourful, colourfast, crisp prints using her local vegetation. These prints have photographic qualities and unique effects linked to the very vegetation used to make them.
She will talk about how she reverses the process, starting with the plant to gratefully accept the colour obtained. Each print can be classified as a “Botanical moment.” She will demonstrate (simply) the printing process, and describe how the process connects her with the environment, and a community of Eco artists interested in sustainability and imperfection made by nature.
This online event is FREE, and will be held via Zoom. Registration Required to receive the Zoom link.
Please note: Our speaker will be joining us from Scotland, which is why this talk starts at 4PM New York time.
About Elizabeth Viguie-Culshaw
From working and teaching locally and in South East Asia (where she travels often), to opening her practice to the world during Covid using Zoom to teach participants in remote places around the world, she realized the richness of this way of teaching, and how it allowed her to surround herself with a community of like-minded individuals.
The True Colour of the Cotinus Botanical printing project was born in May 2020 with a 100 participants using smoke bush leaves on small pieces of paper in their kitchen sauce pans in a live, online printing workshop. She never looked back.
In 2026, eleven years after embracing natural dyes and six years after she started talking to the world, she published her own comprehensive book/manual, allowing many to start their own journeys into Botanical printing from their own places. Her book Botanical Printing on Paper was published on August 25th 2026. She teaches online and in retreats. Learn More about Elisabeth’s book and retreats.
2026 is a very important year for her as it also marks a milestone of her work with Indigo dyeing and a month-long exhibition/festival in Scotland and online. Shades of Blue will open on September 26th. From showing plants and processes in her exhibition, she is offering connections to the world through a collaborative project with one hundred yarn dyers, and offering talks by twelve master dyers from remote parts of the world sharing their heritage processes. Learn more about Elisabeth’s Exhibition..