Under the Tiers

The Mole Creek Collection. Eight tonal semi-solids on a 5 ply merino silk, dyed in the shadow of the Great Western Tiers.

Everything in this collection came off the same hillside. The limestone under the paddocks, the sage-grey light under the man ferns, the leatherwood honey, the one bird you can never photograph, and a hole in the plateau with two hundred metres of air under it.

Three colours — Sassafras, Karst and Man Fern — are dyed in sweater lots, so you can buy five or six matching skeins and get a garment out of them. The other five are three-skein runs. The tonal pairs (Sassafras with Karst, Man Fern with Meander) come from one dye mix at two depths, which is the only honest way to get shades that genuinely gradate.

No speckles. No neons. Just eight colours that go together, dyed by hand in small immersion lots in a working dyeshed at Mole Creek, Tasmania.