About
Tracy Willans is the founder and sole owner of Soewn Earth, which she runs from Dover at the very bottom of Tasmania. She hand-makes natural ink, watercolour paint, and lake pigments entirely from local Australian native plants, foraging and processing every colour herself. The inks are named after the plant they come from: Tasmanian blue gum, peppermint, stringy bark, banksia, acacia, willow. The product and the place it comes from are the same thing.
What she is reviving is close to a lost craft. Making colour from plants, by precipitating pigment out of a dye bath or steeping bark and leaves into ink, is old technology that almost nobody does commercially anymore. The Lost Trades Fair, where she demonstrated at Hanging Rock in Victoria in March 2026, described it as an incredibly rare craft. For working artists, her inks are also a practical thing: a non-toxic, plant-derived alternative to synthetic pigment.
The making is hands-on and tied to where she lives. When a black wattle came down in her wood, she harvested the sap to use as a binder for ink and paint. She floats blue gum pigment onto water and lifts it onto paper, seals finished pieces with beeswax, and paints on recycled book pages. She works in single small batches, so the catalogue is often marked low stock, and she runs an Ink of the Month each month. She also teaches the method, in Tasmania, at mainland fairs, and as far away as Portugal.
Around the craft she has built her own small operation. Soewn Earth sells direct from her storefront, with inks priced at fifteen Australian dollars for fifteen millilitres and thirty for thirty, and she has run an Inkspirations newsletter since 2023. She exhibits at craft fairs and open studios, and travels for residencies, writing a recent newsletter from Iceland. The reach is real but modest: an audience in the low thousands, built one foraged batch at a time, with no mainstream coverage behind it.
Highlights
- Maker
- Tracy Willans, founder and sole owner, working alone
- What she makes
- Natural ink, watercolour paint, and lake pigments from Australian native plants
- Source plants
- Tasmanian blue gum, eucalyptus, Portuguese laurel, banksia, acacia, willow, foraged bark
- Ink price
- Fifteen Australian dollars for fifteen millilitres, thirty for thirty millilitres
- Recognition
- Demonstrated at Lost Trades Fair 2026, billed as an incredibly rare craft
Deeper Dive
Naming each ink after a single plant is the structural choice that defines the work. Tasmanian Blue Gum, Eucalyptus morrisbyi, Portuguese Laurel, Banksia Black, Acacia Rust Gall, Crack Willow, peppermint, stringy bark: the colour is traceable to one species and, often, to one fallen tree on her own land. That makes the supply chain the product. There is no generic pigment number, only a plant and a place, and the chemistry shifts with what the season and the landscape give her.
The economics are deliberately small-batch. Inks sell at fifteen Australian dollars for a fifteen-millilitre bottle and thirty for thirty millilitres, with a recurring monthly sale that drops those to ten and twenty-five. Stock runs out and gets remade rather than mass-produced, which is why the storefront so often reads low stock. The teaching arm does something the bottles cannot: it scales the practice by showing other people how to forage and make their own colour, turning customers into makers.
The cadence is steady and current. She posts new work and new inks most weeks, ran Ink of the Month through April, May, and June 2026, added small artworks to the shop in early June, and was writing from an Iceland residency in late May. The Substack, launched in 2023, carries the longer-form version of the same rhythm, from studio updates to teaching trips abroad. The work is plainly her full ongoing practice, not an occasional side project.
The gap between the craft and the audience is the clearest read. A singular, near-extinct practice, taught across two states and overseas and praised by a heritage-craft fair, sits behind an account of roughly two thousand followers and a newsletter with a modest list. There is no national press, no gallery machine, no agent. One person forages, processes, bottles, sells, and teaches the whole thing herself, which is exactly what makes the operation easy to miss.
In Their Words
“An Acacia mearnsii, black wattle came down in our wood a few days ago so I harvested some sap to use as a binder for ink and paints.”
“Gathering Colour From Place. All natural mixed media.”
