Why this artist is making ink from guns

n February, the artist and ink-maker Thomas Little loaded up his van and traveled around North Carolina to paint 20 delicate, lonely vignettes of American landscapes — each one representing a city in his home state that experienced at least one mass shooting in 2023.

On their subject matter alone, the paintings of water towers, street signs and brick facades are a subtle but harrowing visual record of violence in the US, portrayed through a sense of absence and loss. But the unexpected source of Little’s colors make his scenes even more potent: The pigments are made from the chemical compounds of guns, taken out of circulation and dissolved in Little’s workshop.

For more than five years, Little has performed this kind of alchemy, purchasing handguns and automatic rifles from pawn shops and dissolving the iron-heavy parts in acid to form iron sulfate, the basis for writing inks and artists’ pigments in deep blacks, rusty reds and warm ochres. As the son of a gunsmith, this practice is something of a birthright for him, but entirely subversive as he transforms objects of violence into materials for expression.

Ink is a nebulous material, Little explained in a phone call, made from nearly anything rich in pigments along with the binder gum Arabic. It can be made from foraged berries, leaves, and minerals, but Little became interested in making iron-based inks — the standard for many centuries — from the ferrous parts of firearms. By mixing iron sulfate with tannic acid (which Little derives from cooking the plant sumac), the ink gets its deep shade, which darkens on the paper’s surface once exposed to oxygen.

“I’ve always been into chemistry, and I really liked the history of ink, and (because) my father was a gunsmith, there were always lots of gun parts laying around,” Little said. “So it was kind of a matter of practicality to go about using those parts. But then it was realizing how powerful it was to take a weapon and make it into a writing material or an art supply.”

As an illustrator and animator, Little often felt as if the aim of his practice evaded him. But turning guns into ink has given him a sense of purpose.

“It feels like a remedial process for society, in my mind, and has this wonderful, magical, transmutational (aspect),” he said.

‘Haunted’ landscapes

Traveling around North Carolina, Little felt as if the scenes he painted, each rendered with the remnants of guns, were haunted. (Little didn’t paint the exact sites of each shooting, finding that to be “too grim.”) The 20 cities were home to 33 mass shootings last year — the term is defined as a shooting with at least four victims injured or killed — and are just a small percentage of the 656 across the country. Nearly 43,000 people died from gun injuries across the US in 2023, according to the database Gun Violence Archive.The inkmaker has felt the deep impacts of gun violence on his own life. One of his close friends and mentors in animation, Helen Hill, was killed in New Orleans in 2007 when a stranger entered the home she shared with her husband and young son and shot her in the middle of the night. Her murder was never solved.

“It just left a huge hole in me, and her entire family… her community,” Little recalled. “It was just this huge shock. And it took me years to really work around it.”

For him, making ink is not only a refuge, but a small way to help balance the scales for the lives that have ended by guns.

“Ink is a kind of necromancy. The dead speak to us through ink… through documents from hundreds of years ago,” Little said. “There’s a little bit of poetic justice to use the instruments that silence people, that robbed (their) voice from the world to instead preserve a voice for the future.”