The first one didn't stick around long.

Last year, Hayley Dayis and Alexander Fals turned Colombian volcanic earth into one of the fastest-selling hats we've dropped in recent memory. The raccoon moved. Quick. Now it's back with backup, and there's a second character waiting in the wings.

Hand-foraged color. A returning legend and a festival-first debut. Here's the story behind it.

The Artists

Who Is Foraged Pigment Art?

Hayley and Alex are a couple, two artists, one studio. Both were born and raised in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. But the work that pulled them into our world starts a lot further south.

Every winter, they live in Cauca, Colombia, where Alexander's father is from. And while they're there, they go digging. Literally. They head into the field and pull clays and minerals straight out of the earth, then bring them home and process everything by hand, grinding and sifting until raw rock becomes fine pigment powder. That powder gets mixed into paint. That paint becomes the art you see on these pieces.

No synthetic color. No shortcuts. Just earth, hands, and a whole lot of patience.

The Source

The Color Comes From Volcanoes

This is the part that gets us. Cauca sits on some of the most volcanically active land on the planet. The soil there is called Andisol, formed over millions of years from volcanic ash, glass, and rock fragments left behind by eruptions. It's clay-like, porous, and loaded with both organic and mineral material. Which means it holds an absurd range of color.

All of it pulled from deep inside the earth, pushed up through volcanoes, and settled into the ground over a span of time most of us can't really picture.

Painting with foraged pigment isn't new. It's the oldest form of painting there is. The first cave art ever made was mineral pigment, collected by hand. Before synthetic dyes existed, every color in every painting came out of the ground exactly like this. Hayley and Alex are keeping that lineage alive in a world that mostly forgot it.

The Responsibility

More Than Pigment

Foraged Pigment Art doesn't pretend the land they paint with comes without a story. Colombia is one of the most biodiverse and culturally rich places on earth, and that beauty has made it a target for both admiration and exploitation. Hayley and Alex, as American citizens spending part of each year in Cauca, are open about that tension. They see painting with this land's pigments as a responsibility, a way to honor and uplift Colombia while educating people on a region that rarely gets the spotlight.

They run foraged pigment workshops each summer and fall back in the Finger Lakes, and they're dreaming up a winter artist residency in Popayán, the capital of Cauca, to give local Colombian artists and travelers a platform to create, exchange, and be seen.

That's the energy behind every piece in this collab. Art with roots that go all the way down.

The Origin

How This Collab Happened

Pure Electric Forest serendipity. Hayley and Alex did Electric Forest for the first time last year and ended up camped right next to Ryan, who let them stash their totes under his table. They got to talking. Turns out they already loved a bunch of the artists Grassroots reps, Chris Dyer among them. They showed Ryan their work, walked him through how it's made, and the collab basically wrote itself.

That's the model we've run on from day one. The art of the collab. Real friendships, real makers, art that means something.