Grief & Colour: A Palette To Reflect & Remember with Michaela Lesayova

Working with a collection of plants, flowers and botanical materials, you’ll discover the hidden colours held within the natural world through simple, accessible creative processes. Using natural inks, pigments and botanical mark-making techniques, you’ll create a series of small colour studies inspired by observation, curiosity and the quiet relationships between people, plants and place.

There is no expectation to share personal experiences or have any artistic experience. This workshop offers a welcoming space to explore creativity at your own pace, allowing nature and colour to become companions for reflection, remembrance and connection.

Together we will create, notice and experiment with the rich colours found in plants, discovering how moments of care and attention can reveal beauty in unexpected places. You will leave with your own collection of botanical colour studies and a deeper appreciation for the quiet wisdom held within the natural world.

This project is part of the Seasons of Culture Programme funded by West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Leeds City Council through the Leeds Cultural Investment Programme.

Michaela Lesayova is a founder of livingwell, artist and creative health practitioner based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. As an artist and materials researcher she works with natural colour either foraging (hyper)local seasonal growth like hawthorn, elderberries, alder cones and wild weeds, or growing traditional dye plants and flowers such as woad, weld, marigolds and coreopsis amongst others. Michaela is driven by an exploration of kinship with the more-than-human world and she interrogates the idea of collaboration with ecosystems rather than extraction from them. She is curious about how materials carry their own agencies and temporalities, and how working slowly reshapes our understanding of sustainability as an embodied practice of care.