Narelle Dore

Narelle Dore (b. Australia) is a London-based artist and natural colour researcher whose practice engages colour as a sensorial, embodied, and relational form of knowledge. Trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp, she works with earth pigments, plant dyes, and natural fibres to create textile works, installations, and mark-making actions that map the body’s contact with the natural world. Her practice unfolds through foraging, touch, movement, and material responsiveness, allowing instinct and sensory perception to guide the emergence of each work.

Rooted in endangered material traditions, Dore’s research reclaims forms of ecological and ancestral knowledge that have been marginalised or lost within dominant cultural narratives. She approaches colouring- her term for the full process of harvesting, preparing, dyeing, and making- as a mode of listening and co-creation with natural elements. Embracing unpredictability, she foregrounds volatility and transformation as integral to the work, inviting collaboration with time, weather, and material character. Through this, her practice restores intimacy between humans and landscape, offering quiet propositions for slowness, attention, and embodied truth.

Recent projects include Plants in Parallel at Enso House in London (2024) and commissioned botanical installations for Norden Tibetan Camp on the Tibetan Plateau, China (2025). Alongside her studio practice, Dore has undertaken extensive fieldwork with master artisans and ecological dye communities across Scotland, Mexico, and India, including research into ochre collection, backstrap weaving, and traditional natural dye techniques that bridge contemporary art with ancestral craft.