Instructor: Tonya Lemos
Monday - Friday
July 20 - 24
9am - 12pm
Open Studio: Mon - Thurs, 1pm - 4pm
5 sessions
A week-long exploration of eco printmaking, book arts, and the living language of the natural world
This five-day workshop invites participants to create a collection of small artist books inspired by the textures, colors, and rhythms of nature. Each book will serve as a vessel for personal reflection and ecological storytelling, a space where art and the natural world meet on the page.
Days 1–3:
Material Alchemy — Impressions of the Earth
We’ll begin by working directly with natural materials and elemental processes to create surfaces alive with botanical memory. Participants will experiment with:
Eco-printing using leaves and flowers (tin can, steam, and heat press methods)
Cyanotype and wet cyanotype, including creating cyanotype book cloth from natural fibers
These two days will root our practice in sensory engagement—seeing, touching, and collaborating with nature’s own pigments and patterns.
Day 4-5:
Book Form I — The Accordion: Landscapes of Flow
We’ll craft an accordion-fold book that mirrors the movement of land and water, perfect for displaying panoramic prints or botanical studies.
Book Form II — The Pamphlet or Stitch-bound Book: The Thread of Connection
This day centers on hand-stitching as a meditative act of joining—pages, materials, and stories—into a single rhythm, much like the interdependence of an ecosystem.
Book Form III — The Box or Sculptural Book: The Vessel of Nature
We’ll end the week by creating a sculptural or container-like book form—a folded box, shrine, or bundle—designed to hold our smaller works, seeds, or written reflections. This closing project honors the cyclical and sacred nature of both bookmaking and the Earth itself.
Add a donation for an individual membership, family membership, or pay it forward to contribute to our scholarship program.
A life long environmentalist and plant person, Tony(a) Lemos is a biophiliac, process based conceptual artist who works at the intersection of art and herbalism. Her work centers around nature, wellbeing, creativity, connection and co-existence. She believes art and creativity to be an integral part of the healing process. Presently her work includes eco-printing, photopolymer printmaking as well alternative photography methods, often combining mixed media and found objects into artist books. She likes to explore symbolism from her ancestry (Greek/Middle East) and her deep connection to her present sense of place on Pocumtuc/Nipmuc territory,Ashfield/ Conway MA. She believes there to be such healing when we connect(art+health) materials to place, and has found by using materials from a particular place to help establish a relationship with it. She currently runs Blazing Star Herbal School and teaches at conferences all over New England including The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, the New England Botanical Gardens, The Provincetown Art Museum. This winter she curated and produced work for a successful show at the APE Gallery in Northampton MA called "Mind Memory and Mycelium".