Our sharing today is about the banana sap. If you have ever encountered the sap on fabric, it is nearly impossible to wash off. We can almost say that when life drips banana sap on us, we turn that into ink.
After a collection of many unfortunate encounters with banana sap alongside stories from other farmer friends, we decided to gain the stains a little further with help from Jean (IG: @dyingtradessg). She provided a whole jar of banana sap from her interesting banana fiber studies on her Instagram! (Go check it out! It’s very cool)
The concentrated smell of banana sap was not the most pleasant after allowing the liquid to evaporate and thicken over time. It has a salty and sweaty smell if there was a way to describe it.
Banana sap tends to be watery and slightly milky white when freshly cut from the tree, but oxidizes into a brown as it dries up. What we were able to work with was about 300ml worth of sap which we evaporated over time into a jelly brown liquid.
Needless to say, the application onto fabric was immediate. The jellified sap easily takes into the cloth, giving a rich umber colour! We were curious enough to see how long the colours will remain onto the unmordanted cloth (as with how all accidents happen with banana sap) just to see how it changes over time.
Another well-known property of banana sap is also the ability to stop bleeding and yes, this was tried-and-tested (not deliberately) by both of us. Happy to say it does stop the bleeding quickly, even when we got preettyyy deep cuts by secateurs/bamboo, due to the high amount of tannins (also the ones responsible for the colour change). There are quite a few published studies on the incredible wound healing and anti-microbial properties of banana sap, one of them here if you’re curious.
Post experimentation after almost two months - this is what the paintings look like now:
Whilst the initial dark, rich umber is no longer present, the sap ink has instead lightened up into a coffee brown. These pieces were left hanging in an area where it still receives some indirect sunlight which we expected will lighten up the colour of the sap.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our learnings from the banana tree! Till next time!
Shirin and Liz
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