Cornish Inks is a small, women-owned business in the heart of Cornwall. We roam the landscape, undertaking sustainable foraging practices to create beautiful handmade inks for drawing, painting, and printmaking. Between us, we have many years of experience making and working with botanical inks. Each set of inks we make is site-specific and made in small batches - so they are utterly unique and very limited edition! On this website, we share our practices with you, and you can purchase your own site-specific inks to make beautiful projects of your own.
Here at Cornish Inks, we do things differently. We are trying to find better ways to make art materials that work with the environment in a non-extractive way. We use permaculture-based land management strategies and good foraging practices to ensure we do not harm the environments we work with. We spend time in a place for weeks and months so that we build a relationship with that place. Our gathering takes place as part of our life practices of walking and swimming in the Cornish landscape. We take the least amount of material we can to make our very limited edition inks. Each season, we create a new colour collection from a new site. Our colours, therefore, move with the seasons and with the locations we are in. Each Cornish Inks collection will comprise unique gift boxes of a selection of hand-made inks and a small range of individual products for sale. All our inks are completely site-specific, and when you use our products, you are entering into our world of being and making in those places. We hope this will draw you into new ways of being and thinking with the land in your own making practice, and that you will get enormous pleasure from it, as we do.
Meet the Founders
Elizabeth Tomos and Jennifer Nunez
Elizabeth has been an artist for over 15 years. A long-time climate activist, the wasteful and unsustainable nature of printmaking didn’t sit well with her, which set her on a path to making her own inks. Jennifer is her partner, in life and in the studio. Jennifer loves photography and gathering rocks on the beach!
Sarah McCartney
Sarah has worked with polyester resin and acrylics to create sculptures, drawings and prints for many years, recording and remembering encounters with her homeland and the sea. But a recent decision to reject plastic use as much as possible in her art has led her to explore the processes of ink and paint making, processes which are now inspiring and guiding her art practice.