Janet Day is a lifelong quilter and textile artist, raised by painters and shaped by a childhood spent exploring the colours hidden in plants, soil, and everyday messes.

What began as stained clothes and curious experiments grew into a dedicated artistic practice rooted in natural dyes and sustainable color-making. Her fascination with chromatic processes eventually led her to create Around the World in 80 Dyes, a project aimed at sharing nature’s color sources with broader audiences. Her recent research focuses on natural dyes that produce yellow—a color deceptively simple yet infinitely variable. Flowers, barks, and roots yield yellows that range from bright to earthy, from warm orange tones to deep mustard or brown, each one transformable through pH, heat, soaking methods, mordants, and additives.

During her two-week micro-Residency at Proyecto´ace, she concentrated on two dye plants native to Argentina: fustic, a wood historically used to produce the khaki green of World War II military uniforms, and oxalis, a flower prized for its colorfast resilience. Her work explored the possibilities these plants still hold today, testing how contemporary conditions and processes can expand their chromatic potential.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Kitchen waste, garden waste, wildflowers, trees, bugs, soil and even construction debris can create deep and vivid color for fiber and fabric. I take the resulting fabrics and turn them into unique quilts, often representative of the area where the dye sources were found. I use the items, and the processes to create them, to show that an industry so reliant on chemically created colors doesn’t have to be that way.