Avery Fazio would be lost without her copy of Arnold and Connie Krochma’s 1974 book, The Complete Illustrated Book of Dyes and Natural Sources. She took it from the free box at Canton’s Gallery on the Green thinking she’d harvest its illustrations for collages. The tome is now integral to her work.

“They have recipes that I don’t often see online,” Fazio clutched the book, its pages bursting with colorful tabs and place marks. “If I see something in the woods I don’t know, I take a picture of it and look it up in here to see if you can dye with it.”

Other Fazio essentials include soda ash, black walnuts, matte flashe paint, and a burner plate. Poured medium gives her home-dyed canvas an view-skewing sheen; sand mixed into paint texturizes surfaces. She sprays acorn-dyed silk with iron to create a marbled effect.

“Iron reacts with the tannins in the acorn,” Fazio explained. “Iron is pretty much guaranteed to shift something, often dramatically.”

We were in her studio at the Farmington Valley Arts Center, where Fazio was wrapping her time as artist in residency, a transitional period after graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

With rows of windows overlooking the woods, the Center provided Fazio space to learn more about her process and approach, which, she’s learned, requires letting go: “At school, there was always pressure to make [projects] meaningful. Now, meaning can come after. I don’t have to have all the answers first.”

Being back in Connecticut is also helping Fazio re-engage time itself.

“The changing of the seasons are so much better here than in Savannah,” she said. “I tend to hold on and want things to last forever, but you can’t do that when the seasons change. Dyeing with plants that I can only pick in the summer, I realize, ‘Oh, there’s no holding on.”

A lesson for us all.

More images from Fazio’s studio, including some of her ingredients, including black walnuts.

And be sure to check out Avery Fazio’s website and her Instagram, My Embodiments.