- Rosa Chang
- Apr 15
- 3 min read
Indigo Shade Map is thrilled to share the story behind Inside Indigo through a special interview with Julia Tabakhova. We hope you enjoy this brilliant book and the insights it offers!
Please find Julia’s indigo cultivation story in Calvados, Normandy, France, in our latest On the Map Series post here.
WHY I CREATED IT
Indigo predates science and therefore cannot be solely studied under this lens.
For INSIDE INDIGO, I wanted science and poetry to coexist, to explore indigo chemistry and plant biology outside the lab, but with scientific rigor, intertwined with wonderment intrinsic to anything magic & scientific.
There has long been a need in the indigo world for visualisations detailing the chemistry involved behind the techniques of vat making, extraction, fresh leaf and so on. The scientific documentation on indigo has existed within the field of chemists and scientists for 142 years, but sparingly among dyers.
Once the understanding of organic chemistry and plant biology becomes second nature, it gives you a new metric to explore and experiment around indigo from a different vantage point.
To make those visualisations effective, I preferred drawings to photographs because they are more helpful in illustrating the steps in the different phases. Symbols have been used throughout time as a way to supersede barriers in language.
The tools and precision involved in making these hand drawn illustrations make the process a close relative to the traditional Japanese wood block technique and gives an analogue feel to the book, something to keep the reader immersed into the real world of indigo. This was an intuitive decision as a metaphor for the merit of working by hand.
The friendly colourful drawing style is a backdrop to a more serious and science based content applied to various recipes in a side by side column to the left hand pages. INSIDE INDIGO explores indigo chemistry with an iconography designed for the dyers in order to make it palatable, to grasp key concepts and make the indigo science experience for the reader fun and accessible through first hand recipes and hands on experiments.
I intentionally made the drawings evolve through a visual arc to ease into the complexity, starting with whimsical molecules at the beginning, then morphing slowly into their accurate carbon ring anatomy on the very last pages to tag along the learning curve of the reader.
HOW I CREATED IT
INSIDE INDIGO started as a place to put things, ideas and drawings, one molecule at a time. To articulate the invisible, give a new face to the standardised reaction schemes. And experiment around these visuals. Bridging the boundaries between science and the dye world. Trying to translate these levels of complexity and scientific convention into palatable concepts for the neophyte. To make accessible what the scientific community has studied and drawn through reaction schemes and short hands that fall under pre-established scientific convention, sometimes hard to grasp.
By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you've never been, where failure is very possible. I was terrified and went through self doubt a million times. Indigo binds to other molecules but it also binds people’s hearts, and the support my close-knit indigo community and friends* provided me during these last 3 years made this book possible.
All in all, 3 years of work, 2 years of readings, researching, studying, experimenting, refining, percolating, distillating, sedimenting and decanting this pigment of indigo knowledge. The third year was the hardest: at full speed, the book made itself between my hands. Hand-drawing, digitalizating, and finally organizing the pages in order to make indigo chemistry easy.
More often than not, it felt as if the book was asking for certain pages more than the other way around. It was an urge, a calling, I never experienced this level of frenzy and manic inspiration to this magnitude with my previous projects.
This book marks a scientific footnote in my long examination of indigo for almost ten years. If you've been following me for a while, you know how much time I've committed to experimenting and researching around indigo and indirubin.
In a nutshell INSIDE INDIGO is Science Meets Fun! A devotion to indigo at the service of the blue community 💙
*Foot notes: This book could not exist without my peers. Just to name a few phenomenal contributors to the knowledge on indigo featured in the book and in the bibliographie and references:
Tim McLaughlin and Charllotte Kwon from @maiwaschooloftextiles
Britt Boles from @seaspellfiber
Liz Spencer from @thedogwooddyer
George Fukuda @bailiwickblue
Iris Sullivan Daire from @dreambird.studio
John Marshall “Salvation through Soy“
Dominique Cardon “Le Monde des Teintures Naturelles”
Dorothy Miller “From Seed to Dye”
Seiko Akiyama “The dye Plant of Awa”
J.N.Liles “the art and Craft of Natural Dyeing”
Catharine Ellis & Joy Bouteup “The Art and Science of Natural Dyes”
Michel Garcia “Beyond Mordant”
