HUMANS AS HOLOBIONTS 🪰
In order to understand my artworks, it’s important to understand the social and microbial conditions of their production. Six months into my research, a virus called COVID-19 emerged and has subsequently severely altered human day-to-day activities, including my creative intentions. In my pre-COVID studio, I was able to incorporate fungi and cultivate reishi, oyster, shiitake, and lion’s mane mycelium into my work with ease. Their cultivation indoors requires consistent and strict sterile protocols. I adapted my very unsterile studio space to accommodate them, creating areas where I would have to remember not to breathe. The trajectory of my work changed after the first few months of the pandemic. Access to studio spaces were at times limited if not outright restricted, and I found that I didn’t have the emotional capacity to care for something that required the level of sterility now required for all aspects of life. Wearing masks and gloves was no longer a novelty, it was a way of existing. Through my work I began to embrace the idea of the contaminant as a component or factor of the work. I brought the mushrooms out of their sterile environments and photographed them, becoming the images featured in Wavelength of a Spore/Attachment (2020).
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Fig 10. Wavelength of a Spore/Attachment, Polypropeline prints, grow lights, birch plywood, Mother of Thousands, silicone, plastic bags, grogged clay, potting soil, dirt, microbial culture, brick, latex gloves, cement, golf ball, hardened plastic tubing, plumbob, 5 euro note, pheasant feathers, photographic slides, moss, usnea lichen, ear plugs, shrink wrap, nylon rope, steel wool, honeycomb, beaver wood shavings, fermented garbage* (velvet ribbon, iPhone charger, Skittles®, fidget spinner, newspaper bag, succulent leaves, apple juice, wristband), Heinz® ketchup packets, Encapso™ k, GooGone®, Maynard’s Sour Patch Kids™ mango wrapper, Trident gum insert, Reese’s Pieces®, Energizer Max® box, sticky note with “oyster” written on it, salt, water *Fermented 3 years, 2020.
The images of the mushrooms are backlit with the same grow lights used in their cultivation. The light is cast onto tubes filled with soil, garbage, microbe cultures, and Mother of Thousands plants. The roots of the plants make their way through the layers of soil and detritus, gathering and metabolizing any possible nutrients from ingredients such as Skittles®, honeycomb, fermenting apples, ketchup packets, and wood shavings. The light nourishes the microbes and plants while remaining at a distance, mediated by plastics that act both as a protective barrier and an artifact of the toxic unnatural.