Kota Kinabalu: A Sabah artist and a village community enterprise have joined forces to create art using only what nature provides and the results are now on show at the Ruang Tamu Ekosistem in Alam Mesra.
The exhibition, “Permeated Imprints” is currently on display until March 31, featuring the collaborative work by printmaking artist Rizo Leong and Dumowongi founder Irene Mositol in the third instalment of the ongoing art series.
The exhibition combines Rizo’s woodcut printmaking technique with Dumowongi’s ecoprinting practice, a process in which leaves and flowers are transferred onto fabric using heat, pressure and time to produce colours drawn entirely from nature.
“The works are inspired directly by Irene’s own life journey from her seven years with Partners of Community Organisations in Sabah (Pacos) to her return to her home village in Bundu Tuhan, where she set up Dumowongi and gradually brought her community into sustainable farming and craft,” said Rizo.
He shared how Irene put together a system where community members, particularly women, can drop off their weekly harvest at Dumowongi every Tuesday and Irene then sells the produce directly to hotels and buyers, saving farmers the trouble of having to go to the market themselves.
Their collaboration was also a hands-on learning experience for Rizo and Irene to test different flowers and leaves, steaming them to see how the colours changed before choosing the ones used in the final works.
“The process got me thinking that if one day I return to my own village, I will not need to depend on buying watercolours. If we can create our own colouring using resources from the forest, that is better in the sense that it is more sustainable,” he said.
Rizo spent three days in Bundu Tuhan with the Dumowongi community ahead of the exhibition, a period he called an intensive learning experience. He hopes other artists interested in plant-based natural colours would also come forward to share knowledge.
Irene, who co-curated the exhibition with curator Tasyareena Jekaria, said Dumowongi’s core mission has always been to help women, particularly mothers, earn supplementary income through activities they can do close to home.
“Our main mission and vision are to help mothers earn extra income through various activities,” she said, adding that ecoprinting sits alongside organic herb and edible flower farming as the enterprise’s key activities.
She noted that producing ecoprinted fabric is a multi-stage process. Cloth, much of it collected from local hotels through an upcycling arrangement, must first be boiled and treated with a natural protein solution before any plant material is applied.
Dumowongi uses two main techniques, hammering, where leaves are struck directly into the fabric and steam bundle, where cloth is rolled with leaves and steamed.
The latter, she said, produces colours that hold longer.
“With the steam bundle technique, the colour lasts longer because we use heat to brighten it slightly,” said Irene, pointing to her own bag made over a year ago and washed repeatedly as evidence.
“The colour is still clearly there,” she said.
She said that not all local plants are suitable for the process, pointing out that Dumowongi spent eight months testing plants before identifying those that work.
Butterfly pea flower and roselle look vibrant but lose their colour after washing. Plants like cosmos flowers, dill, heart leaf, perilla and eucalyptus work better. She added that many of these plants already grow in Kota Kinabalu, though most people do not know they can be used as natural dyes.
Dumowongi carries out all farming without pesticides or chemical fertilisers and Irene said the enterprise deliberately avoids synthetic dyes or outside paints in its craft work.
“We do not want to produce work using paints from outside. We want to look at what we can use from around us and that is what we try to share with the community and with young people,” she said.
Both artists said they hope the collaboration will continue. Among their longer-term goals is developing fully natural watercolour pigments from local plants, an experiment Irene said is still ongoing.
“We have been experimenting with how to turn these natural pigments into proper watercolours that could be used for painting or writing, but we have not fully achieved that yet,” she said.
“Hopefully, that will happen as a result of this collaboration,” she added.
