Why I Make Art… with Mushrooms

You may have noticed looking through some of my art pieces that one very common theme is mushrooms. For some, they’re a tasty addition or main course of a meal. For others, a way to escape our current mindset or way of life and beyond. For me, however, they represent something else: a recycling of life.

Everything has a life span, from tiny flying insects that barely live long enough to see 5 sunrises and sunsets to sharks that can be older than the United States as a nation in the arctic. With the end of that life span, what was once a living being is now a combination of cells, a grouping of decomposing tissues. Gross! BUT this gives off nutrients that can be broken down and become food for other creatures, currently living and in the future.

What truly fascinates me is how this is such a universal occurrence, all over the world there are beings of all types and sizes living and dying, and with death comes more life. Spores floating through the air that are too small for the human eye to see, in the billions, are constantly swirling around us looking for a host. When found they spread roots and a number of different fungi can sprout which makes nutrients more bioavailable for other organisms that enter into the cycle.

This is why I decided to call the above piece “recycling”, as it is what mushrooms do - they continue organisms that have passed their time to give to something that hasn’t. It’s truly a beautiful cycle that can go thousands of different ways but ends the same way each time. The fungi may differ, but the process doesn’t.

Speaking directly to this piece, I created it with a distorted/distressed “glitch” look common with a vaporwave aesthetic but for the purpose of reflecting my own journey into these discoveries. The more that I think about the cycle of life, and directly thinking about how everything alive is from something (or many things) that are dead, the more fascinating it becomes.