Aura Montero’s artistic practice intricately weaves together the realms of plants, minerals, and her array of pots, all to create dyes for the aloe hemp she uses in crafting bags. Her profound familiarity with natural dyes and their potential becomes apparent whenever she discusses her craft – it’s evident that she has been on the run for years.

Her methodologies bear resemblance to a laboratory or a kitchen. In her practice, she ingeniously repurposes food scraps that might otherwise be discarded, and employs pots crafted from diverse materials, each designated for specific procedures and hues. Much akin to blending flavors, she combines resulting colors. Her dyeing potions might use onion peels, soda, chinguiza leaves, copper threads, pieces of weathered iron, sawdust from the morito tree, branches of cascarillo trees, or dried coconut scraps. The material of the pot itself can even influence the colors yielded—If she uses a copper pot, the color will change. Subsequent to immersing fibers in the dye potion, she may deploy beer, petroleum, the local spirit chirrinchi, salt, or alum to fix the colors. Resourcefulness is central to her experimentation, with nothing going to waste. The residual liquid, having served its dyeing purpose, is cooked again and mixed with new ingredients for creating new colors or hues. Her process is akin to cultivating a ferment, where each new creation carries echoes of the preceding one.

Aura prefers working when the sun heats. Fortunately, in Atanques, the Kankuamo indigenous reservation where she resides, the sun is usually shining. Rainy days discourage her from dyeing. Prudencia Arias, her maternal grandmother, taught her not only to dye but to combine the resulting colors. She imbibed the notion that red, yellow, and green should stand apart, while combinations like orange, coconut beige, and green do harmonize. She enjoys pairing white with coconut beige or interweaving gray, green, and coconut beige. In addition, her paternal grandmother, Victoria Montero, taught her the art of weaving gauze or straps for the bags. And from her mother, Zoila Arias, Aura obtained knowledge about varied bag sizes and the art of selling. She’s now well-versed in the distinction between men’s preference for monochrome bags – gray or white – and women’s preference for bags adorned in vivid hues, featuring motifs of snails, leaves, or paths.

Just as her mother and grandmothers imparted their knowledge, and helped her building the chapters that now make part of her personal encyclopedia, Aura has perpetuated her expertise within her own family and community. She educates them about stitches, sizes, and the art of selecting and preparing color combinations. If someone seeks to create a particular shade, Aura warmly extends an invitation to observe her alchemical process in a sunny day.

Beyond her mastery of crafting, her food preparations, which include remedies and sweets, are second to none. As a heiress to traditional cooking and ancestral medicines, she keeps them alive in her kitchen. She deftly combines honey and rum with various plants, yielding remedies for headaches, fever, cramps, coughs, flu, and snake bites. She also fashions sweets meant to be savored post-treatment, such as her distinctive chocolate bars. Aura herself picks the chocolate beans, roasts and grinds them. She then kneads the chocolate with different dressings and forms the bars that are meant to dissolve in boiling water. If you pay a visit to Aura, who holds a deep wisdom about the realms of nature and the crafts universe —which can be admired in her bags—, be sure to try her brown sugar loaves and her array of sweets ranging from coconut and pineapple to yam, grapefruit, pigeon peas and ripe banana.