Iris Sullivan Daire

Dream Bird Studio

IndigoFest

What’s your story?

As the youngest of ten, it was a slightly feral childhood, spent amongst the fields and forests of rural Michigan. I felt the wild creatures, the trees, and the small flowers, to be friends. As I grew older I learned all the good farmwife skills; cooking, baking, canning, growing things - one Aunt taught me to weave, another to sew. Everyone I knew knew how to make things.

I moved away at eighteen, became a baker in a city bustling with strangers. As I walked to work in the early morning quiet, it sometimes seemed as though the ghosts of the wolves who once roamed through primeval forests there were somehow, beneath all the concrete, still present.

At twenty I traveled to Oregon to start a new life, eventually attending University of Oregon. There I studied biology, weaving, and how to wrestle color from plants. Early one spring I met a boy, we fell madly in love and married before the strawberries were ripe.

After my graduation we moved to Astoria, at the mouth of the mighty Columbia River. There I took up the tasks of teaching weaving and book arts at the community college, making art, waiting tables, and having babies.

We founded a worker owned cooperative, Blue Scorcher Bakery Café, serving up community as much as pie. After eleven years, at 43, I found myself cancering. Thus, initiated by breast cancer into a whole new direction, I left the bakery and returned to art.

What are your values?

Dream Bird Studio: Connection, Joy, Beauty.

Connection - to the Earth, to the deeper self, and to community

Joy - in the exploration of the natural world, in the creative process, and in collaborative relationships with others

Beauty - of the web of life, of the inner light, and of those sharing the path

I would like if my obituary could contain this line: “She amplified love.”

What can we find at Dream Bird Studio and IndigoFest?

Since 2018 I have been half of a collaborative partnership with Brittany Boles, another indigo artist here on the North Oregon Coast. Our project, IndigoFest, works to create educational content for our community around growing and dyeing with indigo. We offer dye plants locally, and offer various classes and events both in person and online.

Dream Bird Studio is my personal art business, under it I make wearable art so others can wrap themselves in healing plant magic. I teach natural dye and indigo workshops in person, and online, with the aim of holding space for people to tether more firmly to their own inner knowing, and connect to the natural world through the materials we use.

As an artist it is my joy to create textile installations that hold stories - stories of the plants who bestow them with color, and of the human heart. Some installations involve a performance art component.