Growth is typically slow and steady. A series of small changes that occur in correspondence with long stretches of time. Yet, this is the antithesis of the world we live in today. A world where we feel entitled to overnight solutions, and immediate gratification. Textile designer Graham Keegan has a different approach, and we’re taking notes.
Graham approaches his creativity as a growth cycle of its own; a natural occurrence. Originally from northern Vermont, Graham grew up with an innate curiosity in his surroundings– in plants and foliage– so it’s no surprise that he now exclusively works with natural dyes. “I always knew that plants had a larger functionality than what I was familiar with,” he explains. His youth was spent wondering which plants were edible, which ones could be used to make tea. The older he got, the more his education aligned with his wonderment.
His mother owns an art supply store, so in many ways, he grew up like most of us: in a world where supplies came pre-packaged. When it came to approaching art, Graham was familiarized with the standard options of oil, watercolor and acrylic, until his junior year in high school when one of his teachers, a surface designer, introduced him to the indigo plant and the color it produced. When he first witnessed a piece of fabric being dipped into a vat, it instantly turned yellow, and as it oxidized, transitioned to blue. “It looks like a magic trick,” Graham explained.
He graduated from a liberal arts college in Vermont where he explored art history courses and learned that once upon a time, artisans made their own paints. He began to work in screen printing, making band merch, but his creativity was itching to explore different sources of materials beyond the plastics he’d print onto throwaway garments. His spirit was guiding him toward something more lasting and sustainable. While he had successfully grown his first indigo plant in a community garden, he had no understanding of how to get the color out. He sought out books, but couldn’t find anything at that time that offered the answers he was looking for. “It didn't even occur to me then that there was a natural way to get the color out,” Graham told me.
In 2009, a time when big cities were still seen as a requirement in the promise of success, Graham packed up his questions and left the northeast for sunny southern California, the land where anything grows. He began growing persimmon trees and an evolving collection of dye books with publication dates that range from the 1790s to today. “I began to understand the constraints of using different dyes besides indigo from reading the history of others that had tried different methods,” he says. He wound up in Silverlake with a small vat on his back porch, no certainty of what he would do with the container, but a blooming interest to explore what was possible.
Alongside his slow revelations and the faster growing resources of the web and social media, a larger community began to emerge for Graham. Other dyers were soon sharing their processes online, newer publications were released, and throughout it all Graham decided to catalog his own progressions. “I wanted to witness my own capabilities take shape,” he explains of this documentation.
Though many of us no longer need the proximity to a major city to grow our businesses and expand our interests, there’s a natural evolution to real-life connections that can’t be replicated online. While Graham spent the first three to four years in Los Angeles doing odd jobs in commercial production, he soon made friends with an employee at Free People and showed her some of the swatches he’d created outside of work. “These are things people buy,” his friend told him. It had never occurred to Graham that such small scale works, created for his own interest and reference, were things other people would want to purchase.
Once that unexpected profitability aligned with what he did on his own time, his business venture came to be, almost by accident. “The business portions of it all are coincidental,” he says. Accidents, even mistakes, have been a crux in building his brand. While he does scour books on end, it’s the mistakes that generate his best ideas. “There’s always something that I’m trying to do, and then something else happens,” Graham tells me. Sometimes a piece of fabric will accidentally fold and the result is a zigzag pattern that he’ll then try to replicate intentionally. He doesn’t classify these events as good or bad, he just documents them, tries to understand why they happened in the first place. With this repository of documented processes, he’s able to free up his head space so that when he does return to the ideation stage, he has a fresh perspective and can consider his self-created catalog of possibilities with a more mindful approach. The visual collection of notes is shaping up to be a beautifully curated book he hopes to eventually publish.
Part of what makes a creative life sustainable for Graham is his consciousness around the commodity of time. He’ll try to start his days slowly, get outside for a walk, and cook meals for himself. Protecting his time in that sense requires boundaries. He limits time spent online or answering emails and deletes his Instagram app, only re-downloading it when he has something to share. Like all of us, he has no infinite expanse of time. And even still,“I would say only 8% of my life is spent in the studio making new things,” he tells me. “I don’t feel like I have any “free” time. I never wonder, what am I going to do today?”
Graham’s business not only entails the sale of his prints to major retailers, or the creation of his book-in-progress, which he hopes to spend more time on in the year to come. He also sells seeds for indigo (blue), weld (yellow) and matter (red). “With those three you can get any color in the natural dye spectrum,” he says. While he spends most of his time in California, he maintains a footprint in Vermont and offers a variety of natural dye workshops in both locations. In his workshops, Graham walks around the natural environment with his students and together they notice what’s available, allowing room for questions, like: What can we make with these types of plants? What happens if we mix these two plants together?; What will they produce? The physical interaction between people and plants, forcing people to get their hands dirty doing something– a huge contrast to the average person’s normal life today – is where Graham’s real passion resides.
Another long-term project on Graham’s docket is to rehab an old building back in rural Vermont located near the Marshfield School of Weaving, which pairs well with his natural dye curriculum. He hopes to build a facility for programming; a physical space dedicated to the broader education of natural dying and what it can do for our planet. “Natural dying has its own areas of concern when it comes to [waste],” he says, but it’s clear to me that where there are no answers, Graham is able to witness possibility.
When I think about how we use the words “spend” and “waste” and “kill” in regard to our time and what we do with it, it’s understandable that we find ourselves naturally tempted by profit and convenience. These verbs are reflective of what we value as a society. My conversation with Graham reminded me that the seeds we plant for our own personal growth and the small areas in life that we dedicate our time to are what bear fruit. That is our unique gift to the world. ❤
STORY CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHY Anna Wolf
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