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Atramentum

‘ Atramentum is an open-ended series of natural inks ’

Ink is technically defined a pigment plus water or oil, plus a binder. It is one of the first tools humans created through a combination of knowledge, intuition and likely happy accident, to satisfy our desire to communicate. It is one of the earliest instances of human hand transmuting organic materials into new form with the intention of giving it an entirely new purpose. In Ancient Rome, ink and dye, which appeared most commonly as a carbon black or iron gall black, called Atramentum ( a word referring to the blackening or darkening of something ). 

Marta Abbott’s Atramentum is an open-ended series of natural inks. Each color, each ink is a result of the desire to communicate, to connect, and to understand a material through the process of its transformation. Every bottle contains the results of an attempt to extract a representation of a place, a moment, a memory,, the ever-changing beauty of an organic form or the traces left behind by an experience in liquid form. These inks are a way to convey the way that Marta see’s the world around her, and her hope is that they will serve as tools with which to do the same for whoever uses them.