From nurse to visual artist, Sally Blake translates the subtle languages of nature into stunning visual narratives, bridging the human experience with the natural world. She shared her story with us during her Friday Feature Artist interview.
Sally Blake's Friday Feature Artist Interview can be found at the bottom of this page.
Have you ever imagined the stories hidden within the colours of nature waiting to be revealed? What if leaves and bark could communicate their secrets through colour and even smell?
Sally Blake translates the subtle languages of nature into stunning visual narratives. She is a remarkable artist who bridges human experience with the natural world. Thanks to a research grant supported by the Australian Council and Arts ACT, Sally painstakingly collected dyes from the leaves of 230 species of eucalypts and 100 barks to create a vibrant palette that brings her art to life.
Outside of natural dyes, Sally’s fine copper basketry showcases intricate craftsmanship, and her exploration of ancient glyphs connects us to timeless human stories. Having recently moved from Canberra to Brussels, Sally has been enhancing her art practice for over 20 years.
From Nurse to Visual Artist
Sally transitioned from being a paediatric nurse and midwife to a visual artist.
"When I got out of school, I was always tossing up between doing art or becoming a nurse, and I'm really glad I did it the way I did, because I loved being a nurse and a midwife."
However, she reached a point where she was "Just trying to come with up more and more time to make art. Eventually, a friend of mine said to me, ‘Sal, I think it's time you go to art school.’"
Whether it was conscious or not, Sally admits that her previous career has flowed through to her current work, with themes of birth and regeneration cycles. “I realised I was always looking at the patterns and processes of nature. Being a midwife, you see some very big moments in life, including death, and can see the power of them.”
Eucalyptus Dyes
Sally's fascination with natural dyes, particularly from eucalyptus trees, has been a significant part of her artistic journey. She created a eucalyptus dye database, using 230 species of leaves and 100 different barks. It was a career-changing piece of research that established her name in the industry.
"When I was at art school, there was a student in the year above me, who knew about natural dyes. I started by trying to dye cotton, which didn’t do much, but even that tiny hint of colour got me really excited,” she explains.
Sally’s artistic journey took her to the ACT (in Australia), where she had a residency and spent time in the National Botanical Gardens. “They became interested in the dyes and we hatched a plan,” she says. “They had the second largest eucalyptus collection in Australia and they were so helpful. I set up a method to achieve consistent results, with specific amounts of each leaf, bark and water.”
Sally created patchwork squares ranging from pale creams to deep reds to document her progress - you can view the database on her website. However, in her regular practice, Sally takes a more intuitive and ad-hoc approach, explaining, "I really do just shove leaves in a water and let it go, like what most people would practice, and that's what I would definitely recommend."
After immersing herself in her natural dyes project, Sally could tell what colour would come from the leaves just by smelling them. She explains that the age of the leaves, placement of the tree and even the recent weather will affect the dye you can create, to the point where it’s not really possible to recreate consistent results.
“Imagine if you had the knowledge to be able to read the colour and know what it meant about what the tree was living in,” Sally muses. Her advice for aspiring artists is to “put the leaves in a pot and boil them and see what happens. Use the leaves in your vicinity so you understand more about your place.”
Copper and Venus
Sally is also known for her fine copper basketry and Venus-like sculptures. Her journey to use copper was influenced by a car accident and the loss of her mother, which left her “in shock” for a couple of years. Eventually, a friend handed her a small skeletonised seed pod.
The pod, “looked like a lantern and inside was a little seed. I felt like it represented the potential of new life and I wanted to find a medium that would help me recreate that fragility but also strength. I fiddled around and the copper wire was the most useful.”
The Venus figurines also embody the sense of death and renewal, and the cycle of life. “There has been a common theme over time, and across the breadth of Europe, of figurines that represent the ‘Goddess’,” explains Sally. “I started drawing one of the figurines discovered by an archaeologist, a 30,000-year-old ceramic that is the oldest known example in the world. As I created it, I wondered how the people who lived back then would look out onto the world today.”
Balancing Brains
Sally's work as an artist blends academic research with intuitive artistic creativity; bringing the left and right brain together.
“I had other creative projects going on while I was working on the eucalyptus dyes,” Sally says. “But I feel like when I'm making, I go into a different state. Everything I’ve read is still there, but it’s just sort of coming out of my fingers.”
Sally emphasises that her eucalyptus dye databases were the most ‘rigorous’ elements of her art and that she is generally highly intuitive when working on projects. “You can have all the information and everything, but what I make just pops out of… somewhere. I don’t necessarily think it through," she explains.
Advice From Sally
Sally’s intuition and instincts have led to her winning prestigious prizes, including the Blake and the Waterhouse prize.
As she “potters along” on wire works from her base in Belgium and considers how she will create more dyes in the future, Sally has the following advice for artists:
- Own a sense of wonder.
- Create what's in your soul.
- Believe in the power of pure curiosity.
Avoid the very awful, harsh inner critic. Sally adds, “Perfectionist tendencies stop people from making, and this bothers me… people become so stuck and forget that you have to make crappy stuff before the good stuff comes. It will never be perfect, and that’s what makes it right.”
