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.

Pushing paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now MARCIA KURE on Drawing

Marcia Kure talks about drawing and her work in the British Museum touring show:

Pushing paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now

A British Museum Touring exhibition. Generously supported by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

19 September - 29 November 2020 - Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery is part of the City of Swansea and supported by the Arts Council of Wales

Transcript from Video for Pushing paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now

I am fascinated by the idea of drawing-
To draw, to pull, to tug at something
Since my encounter with Uli script writing and South African cave drawings, I have always sought to push the boundaries of what drawing can be, what does it mean - to draw - Stretching the boundaries of its meaning, expanding the notion and freeing it from the confines of 2 dimensionality. Also, rethinking 2 dimension - what it mean as it relates to drawing?
This - in varied forms have been the quest central to my practice as an artist.

I have pulled needle and thread through fabric, used the cut of scissors as line, stitched with a sewing machine and drawn the spaces in-between line.
Felt and molded clay with my hands to form the contours of a body
And asked the question -

Must line be something you can see?
Can line be a leaf falling from a tree, a walk, can a be a journey. Can it also be the experiences within that journey?
Must drawing be visible to the naked eye?

One thing to always remember about drawing is that it is seminal, it marks the beginning of something and like a stem cell, drawing can become anything.

Drawing places a mark, it records time, space, distance and movement.

About the work in Pushing paper
The drawing in Pushing Paper was conceived as a suite of drawings for the Paris Triennale, Intense Proximity, curated by Okwui Enwezor, in 2012
It is a configuration of Uli scriptwriting from Southeastern Nigeria, the biomorphic shapes of Nok terracotta sculpture and Bamana Boli figures from Mali, Traditional hand-drawn Disney animation, surrealism, and a touch of kawaii

Following its initial presentation, the exhibition toured across the United Kingdom, extending its questions around inscription, power, and collective form into multiple institutional contexts. It was first presented at the British Museum in London (September 12, 2019 – January 12, 2020), before traveling to the Oriental Museum in Durham (February 29 – May 17, 2020). The work later moved to the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea (September 19 – November 29, 2020), then to The Cooper Gallery in Barnsley (December 12, 2020 – March 6, 2021), and most recently to the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness (April 2 – June 4, 2022). Across these sites, the installation encountered new architectures and publics.

What Dot saw on a Walk

The story details a straight blue line who is hopelessly in love with a red dot. The dot, finding the line to be stiff, dull, and conventional, turns her affections toward a wild and unkempt squiggle. Taking advantage of the line's stiffness, the squiggle rubs it in that he is a lot more fun for the dot.

The depressed line's friends try to get him to settle down with a female line, but he refuses. He tries to dream of greatness (seeing himself as a daredevil, a leader in world affairs, a law enforcer, a vital element in the art world, and a sportsman) until he finally understands what the squiggle means and decides to be more unconventional. Willing to do whatever it takes to win the dot's affection, the line manages to bend himself and form angle after angle until he is nothing more than a mess of sides, bends, and angles. After he straightens himself out, he settles down and focuses more responsibly on this new ability, creating shapes so complex that he has to label his sides and angles in order to keep his place.

When competing again, the squiggle claims that the line still has nothing to show to the dot. The line proves his rival wrong and is able to show the dot what she is really worth to him. When she sees this, the dot is overwhelmed by the line's responsibility and unconventionality. She then faces the now nervous squiggle, whom she gives a chance to make his case to win her love.

The squiggle makes an effort to reclaim the dot's heart by trying to copy what the line did, but to no avail. No matter how hard he tries to re-shape himself, the squiggle still remains the same tangled, chaotic mess of lines and curves. He tries to tell the dot a joke, but she has realized the flatness of it, and he's forced to retreat. She realizes how much her relationship with the squiggle had been a mistake. What she thought was freedom and joy was nothing more than sloth, chaos, and anarchy.

Fed up, the dot tells the squiggle how she really feels about him; denouncing him as meaningless, undisciplined, unkempt, unaccountable, insignificant, indeterminant, inadvertent, out of shape, out of order, out of place, and out of luck. She leaves with the line, having accepted that he has much more to offer, and the punning moral is presented: "To the vector belong the spoils." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dot_and_the_Line

Paul Klee:

A line is a dot that went for a walk

Question:

Where did the dot go?

What did the dot see? Who did the dot meet? How did the dot feel on the walk?

#studionotes

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Directed by Chuck Jones

Co-directed by Maurice Noble

Narrated by Robert Morley

Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film (1965).