The mycelium tortoise shell is meant to be a functional object that can serve many uses. I see it living in the garden as a sort of “lawn ornament” that will be overtaken by local plant life and possibly serve as a shelter for small animals and bugs. I’d love to sprout fruiting bodies from it in a controlled space so that they might form legs to stand it up as a vessel for holding a plant of some other thing. I can also imagine it being worn as a hat or used as a basket for foraging.
The idea was to create a bacteria cellulose sheet and then print onto that an illustration that describes the bacteria’s history; how they were created and indeed how they would perish. I imagined a tome of sorts combining a scientific diagram of the process with imagery representing aspects of the growth cycles.
Do you remember carving little love hearts into a tree? This is like that, except for it’s carved out of inanimate material and then life is added into the wound. In this case the flesh like quality of the agar and red pigment of the Ecoli give it the feeling of a bloody wound.