Pigment, Extraction, and the Weight of Material

When I began developing my proposal for the wall drawing installation at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, I returned to a question that continues to structure my practice: Where does a material begin?

It does not begin in the studio or on the wall. It begins in soil, bark, seed, and mineral. It begins in cultivation and labor. It begins within systems of knowledge that precede artistic intention. To ask where a material begins is to ask about geology, agriculture, trade, and the movement of bodies across territory.

Right: A close-up view of two kola nut shells. The shell on the left shows natural post-harvest decay, while the shell on the right remains freshly harvested and intact. Despite the deterioration of the outer husk over time, the inner kola nut remains preserved once the shell is removed, underscoring kola nut durability. Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection. Photography by Yaw Afrim Gyebi, 2025.

Left: Botanical lithograph of Cola acuminata (kola nut plant), 1906, illustrated by Matilda Smith for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. The composition presents the plant in scientific detail, with elongated leaves, delicate star-shaped flowers, and segmented pods shown both intact and opened to reveal the seeds within.

During my visiting professorship at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2019, I extended my study of kola nut pigment and its extraction, a material I have worked with since my years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. At the same time, I began thinking more rigorously about naturally derived pigments in general: plants, earth, minerals, and the processes through which they are crushed, soaked, burned, fermented, and ground before binding to a surface. Each stage involves technical knowledge and intervention. Each stage situates pigment within systems of extraction and exchange.

© MARCIA KURE. This video clip captures a lecture by Malla Tallgren on pigments and their material life, presented on Monday, 9 September 2019, at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Challenging the idea that color is immaterial, Tallgren examines pigments as concrete particles derived from distinct material sources, each with its own shape, size, and chemical composition. Tallgren is a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. The lecture formed part of Pigments from Nature, a course developed by Tallgren and held at Mejan for the first time in collaboration with Kristina Janni Ståhl.

While in Stockholm, I attended a lecture by Malla Tallgren, a specialist in painting materials and methods whose course on natural pigments traces the historical and technical dimensions of color production. The lecture was methodical and materially grounded. What remained with me was a structural insight: every pigment has a lineage. No color is neutral. Each carries the conditions of its making.

This awareness clarified the material and historical weight of working with indigo and kola nut. Indigo cultivation in the Americas relied on agricultural knowledge carried by enslaved West Africans, embedding diasporic expertise within plantation economies. What appears as a luminous blue is inseparable from forced migration, coerced labor, and transatlantic exchange. Kola nut, long central to West African ceremonies and trade networks, entered colonial commodity circuits and later industrial production, shifting from communal exchange to global consumption. Both materials exceed pigment. They bear the marks of displacement, circulation, and transformation.

To use indigo and kola nut in a drawing is not merely a chromatic decision. It situates the work within routes of travel, systems of value, and accumulated histories. Pigment becomes condensed geography, matter carried through hands, territories, and markets before arriving in the studio.

© MARCIA KURE: Sketch for Menil Wall Drawing Commission, 2021

In that installation, the line does not function as contour or boundary. It operates as linkage. It evokes trade routes, fiber optic cables, scars, and migration paths. The line collapses distance and disrupts sequence. It stages simultaneity rather than progression. The drawing becomes a mesh in which fragments intersect and overlap, carrying residues of past systems into present configurations.

The more I examined pigment extraction, the more I understood that materials themselves are networks. Extraction intervenes in land. Processing applies knowledge to matter. Trade circulates value. Use inscribes surface. Each mark therefore contains prior actions. It is never isolated from the systems that produced it.

The work proposes that drawing is a form of infrastructure: a field where matter, memory, and power converge and become legible.

This recognition altered how I approached the wall. A surface is not neutral. It can be scarred, gouged, and stained. It can register pressure and incision. Just as pigment holds histories of labor and trade, substrate holds histories of force. The wall becomes a field where material memory is made visible.

Thinking through merchant capital, in which bodies were bought and sold to generate profit, and surveillance capital, in which data is harvested and monetized, I began to see continuity in extraction logics. Soil is mined. Minerals are mined. Attention is mined. Data is mined. Technologies change, but the structural logic of accumulation persists. Exchange remains central to value production.

Pigment extraction therefore operates in this work not only as subject but as method. To draw with indigo and kola nut is to acknowledge that drawing participates in historical and contemporary circuits of exchange. To stain a wall with these substances is to foreground the entanglement of aesthetics and economy, of beauty and violence.

Material knowledge is inseparable from political knowledge. The way a pigment is sourced, processed, and circulated shapes the conditions under which it appears as art.

Since Stockholm, I have become more deliberate about the weight I place on materials. I do not ask them only to describe form. I ask them to carry memory and to register systems. Networks of Entanglement proposes that drawing is not a neutral act of mark making. It is participation in exchange. It is inscription within layered structures of power, labor, and value. Pigment, granular and seemingly quiet, is never neutral. It arrives already entangled.