special event!
Ochre Works
Among Ovahimba women, grinding ochre is a daily task. They cover their entire bodies, hair, clothing and children with it each day.
October 19,
12pm PDT
A few weeks ago there was a convocation of ochre researchers in Alta Norway that Heidi Gustafson took part in. When she got home and told me about all the different ochre pathways they traveled, I realized we need to begin bringing some of this new research forward. In addition, we have had such a tremendous response to red ochre as Pigment of the Month, and to Brandi MacDonald's talk, that we decided with all the incredible research being done on ochre that we couldn't just end it there, so we have put together a round-table discussion that includes ochre researchers from a variety of disciplines. This special group includes: Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, Jill Huntley, Tammy Hodgskiss, Daniela Rosso, and Heidi Gustafson, and Elizabeth Velliky.
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Each of these researchers brings a unique perspective, knowledge and experiences relating to ochres, providing a wide range of expertise. It’s not enough to say that Jill is a rock art specialist or Heidi feels ochre spirits, because each of these people fluently cross disciplinary boundaries to connect ochres, their use, history and their vital roles in human evolution, health and cultures throughout time and across space, in multivalent ways. Join us to learn about the cutting edge work being done around the oldest, most used and vital pigment in the world, ochre.
Ochre Works will replace our regular Pigments Talk segment on October 19, 12pm PDT. The event will be online and recorded; we will make the recording available to PRI members in our Members Recordings on our resources page.​
Everyone is invited to this free, special event.
meet our experts
PRI events are recorded and made available
to members on our website.
Elpitha Tsoutsounakis (she/her) is a Cretan-American designer, printer, and educator based in Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States. She is an assistant professor and founding faculty in the Division of Multi-disciplinary Design at the University of Utah where she teaches design studios, research methods, and visual strategy. She completed a BS in architecture at the University of Utah and an M.Arch at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship combines community based design researc
Dr Elizabeth (Beth) Velliky is a Postdoctoral Fellow in archaeology at the University of Bergen SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) in Bergen, Norway. She holds a dual doctorate in Archaeology from the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia and the University of Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany. Her research focus is to combine methods and perspectives from archaeology, anthropology, geology, chemistry, contemporary art and ethnography to study the relationship between mi
Daniela Rosso is a post-doctoral researcher at the Univ. de Valencia, funded by the APOSTD-Generalitat valenciana fellowship. She obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Bordeaux (France) and the University Barcelona (Spain). Her research focuses on the first uses of colour. Colour, in fact, strongly shapes our perception of the world and plays a main role in the emergence of language and in the transmission of information. By retracing how and when this cultural feature appeared amon
Dr Jillian Huntley is an archaeological scientist based in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research and Associate of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution. She is interested in the influence of large scale environmental shifts on the way people used art and ritual across the human history of the most climatically dynamic region on Earth - the Australasian Monsoon Domain. Jillian specialises in the physicochemical characterisation of ochres (mineral pigments), rock art a
Dr Tammy Hodgskiss is the Curator at the Origins Centre Museum, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Tammy was born and bred in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is an archaeologist and received her PhD in 2013 from the University of the Witwatersrand under the supervision of Prof Lyn Wadley. She researches and has published on ochre use in the Middle Stone Age of South Africa, employing primarily use-trace analytical methods, supported by experimental analogies/understanding. Her resear
Heidi Gustafson is an artist, researcher, and ochre specialist based on an isle of the Salish Sea in northern Washington, USA. Her highly collaborative and intuitive projects include an ochre archive with over 900 earth pigments from around Earth. She is the author of Book of Earth: A Guide to Ochre, Pigment, and Raw Color (Abrams), and most recently, a talismanic limited edition book, Darkness At Noon As Mountain Goes Mad. Her website can be found at earlyfutures.com.
While several of these expert's backgrounds are based in archaeology, each approaches the subject of ochre from a different perspective which gives us a taste of the incredible range of information being gathered as well as the immense importance of ochre to human life.
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