Growing up in Virginia, I was invariably blanketed in green. Inescapable tunnels of vegetation were both overwhelming and comforting. I was at home among the trees and became an observer of the landscape. I started rock climbing as a child and learned more from climbing outside than I ever did in a classroom. Climbing forced me to observe every handhold and foothold, taking note of each micro grain of crystal under my fingertips. This forced observation serendipitously brought me face to thallus with lichens.
This relationship was originally one of annoyance: A tactile feeling of insecurity as my toes slid with the lichens off the edge of a rock face. There is no reciprocity between climber and lichen. We brush and scrape them from their homes and leave chalk graffiti in their wake. Their dust settles to the ground under our packs and dogs and rubber shoes. No longer are their bodies cycling nutrients into the air. And in their final moments, they sacrifice their lives as decomposition transforms their bodies into soil. I never thought of lichens as more than crust until recently.
I was a student of Industrial Design at Virginia Tech in 2022 and focused my education and thesis on the continuity of design and craft. I was endlessly inspired by the craftspeople of Appalachia (and Indigenous communities within them) and what one could learn from their approach to making objects from regional materials that last for generations. What separates industrial design from other forms of design is the focus on alleviating human pain points. Designers ask, “How can I design this product to help people?” The first step in this process is research, compassion, and understanding the problems. My specific application of this practice began with climate research.
Half of Americans live in counties with unhealthy ozone and particle pollution, which can be particularly harmful to people with preexisting respiratory conditions like those from COVID-19 or from working in or living near coal mines. Many of these Americans are Appalachians living in valleys where this pollution gets trapped by warm air at ground level between mountains.
Lichens die when pollutants are too concentrated in an environment, serving as an indicator species of air toxicity—a canary of sorts—for climatologists and local government employees. Upon reviewing my research, I discovered a question. How can a quilt dyed with lichens grow a conversation around the preciousness of even the most overlooked organisms while educating communities about their surrounding air quality and climate change?
Lichens are complex organisms composed of a mutualistic relationship between multiple fungi, cyanobacteria, and algae. The algae provide food to the lichen through photosynthesis, while the fungi provide structure. Some lichens also have a third member (cyanobacteria) that provides food through photosynthesis and fixes nitrogen to support its own growth and the health of plants around it.
Scientists estimate that 100,000 species of lichen exist. They are abundant most everywhere on Earth, including harsh environments from Antarctica to the world’s hottest deserts. They provide habitat, food, and shelter for other organisms and occupy landscapes where no other organisms can survive. As important pioneer organisms, they produce acids that chemically weather rocks, breaking them down to form soils for future plants to inhabit.
Because lichens have different tolerances to air quality, scientists can use information about the abundance and diversity of lichen species to monitor air pollution in remote forests, rural hollers, suburban neighborhoods, and crowded cities. But lichens themselves are quite susceptible to climate change and air pollution. Sulfur dioxide and ozone immediately kill species like smooth rock tripe (Umbilicaria mammulata) that is found across the globe and in abundance here in Appalachia. Certain species of lichens can take hundreds of years to grow larger than a penny—and can live for thousands more—making them particularly vulnerable to overharvesting, habitat destruction, and air pollution.
Just as scientists can use lichens to help paint the picture of climate changes across the centuries, artisans have used quilts for hundreds of years as storytelling objects. Their myriad geometries vary across stylized, abstract, and representational patterns of fabric. These qualities make a quilt an ideal object to help visualize complex data. Data visualization is a way to communicate numerical data through graphs and charts. Data art takes that visualization one step further by displaying the data in a more abstract way to convey an emotion.
The data used for this quilt was collected in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia by James D. Lawrey, a biologist at George Mason University; and Mason E. Hale, Jr., a curator of lichens at the Smithsonian Institution. By measuring sulfur accumulation in a common lichen species, the researchers showed an increase in atmospheric sulfur, which is thought to have occurred due to an increase in motor vehicle traffic in the park.
A rise in atmospheric sulfur can cause acidification that negatively impacts soils, waterways, and air quality, ultimately contributing to climate change. I used this data to inform the quilt’s geometry and color patterns, and I used the topography of the collection site to quilt the piece together. Ultimately, my quilt is a handmade object with imperfections, more data art than visualization. Unlike the science on which it is based, precision and accuracy was not the objective.
Like a quilt draped over a person, lichens blanket landscapes with patches of color and texture. Oranges, blues, yellows, and greens create a natural textile of sorts high up on rock faces. My lichen dye process began with a conscious practice of “salvage botany,” a technique used by foragers to gather only those lichens found on the ground that were already detached from rocks. After collection, I submerged the lichens in a 1:1 water and ammonia solution and left them to ferment for at least six months or until the liquid was a dark, orange-ochre color. This liquid is known as orcein, or purple/red lichen dye. The dye color changes from orange to purple when exposed to oxygen. Then, I dipped fiber in the dye for 24 hours and dried it.
I chose cotton and hemp fabrics for maximum color saturation and feel. Cotton thread was also used as well as cotton batting for the internal layer. The quilt was constructed of 576 squares that reflected lichen data from the study. The topography of the data collection area is the quilted portion of the construction. The colors of the quilt represent different data collection sites and are a visual representation of the increase in atmospheric sulfur. The quilt gives physical form to the liquid dye and embodies the lichen data through its color and geometry. It combines both properties of the lichens—their dye and the information they reveal—in one dynamic object.
It’s important for me to stress the singularity of this quilt. Lichens are sensitive yet enduring organisms, which is partly why they are such successful indicators of environmental health. Lichen dyes are a controversial craft. The greatest threat to their survival—and to the ecosystems they pioneer—is human activity. The lichens chosen for this project were salvaged from the forest floor, collected after a strong windstorm blew them from their connection points to the rock.
And yet this conscious foraging is still not, as the greenwashing trademark says, ‘sustainable.’ I extracted these organisms for education and awareness, or so I convinced myself. I made a finite amount of dye and gave rigorous thought to its application. Even so, making an object for warmth in a warming climate out of a sensitive organism is haunting.
These lichens give back to us and our most vulnerable. They have been used in studies to reveal environmental inequalities by showing that low-resource neighborhoods had the highest quantities of air pollution. The lichens give us soil where it never existed. They give us food in times of famine and dye to make royal purples to be traded as gold. But what reciprocity do we practice? How can we live mutually with the lichens as they do within themselves? I guess this quilt is my reciprocity with the rock tripe. Or at least the beginning.
Karen Lane is a climber, designer, and photographer living in Fayetteville, WV. The breadth of her work includes fiber arts, product design, and photography of her life as an artist in Appalachia.
