For this project I was thinking about our cultural relationship to death and decay. I wanted to create a headstone made from mycelium to make a less permanent marker for graves that decays with time. This was also an experiment to try to form text with mycelium. This project did not work the way I initially imagined and I demolded it too early due to time constraints.
My hope is that we can grow a future in which we protect the people already living, to make it a safer place for those to come. Decay is needed for growth and nothing exemplifies this fact more than mushrooms.
This project consists of two boxes grown from mycelium. The smaller box is made with grey dove oyster mushrooms, and the larger is a mix of grey dove and pink oysters. Each is decorated with passionflowers. The boxes are intended to be small caskets or burial vessels for birds or other small animals.
This project used Grey Dove (Pleurotus Ostreatus) oyster mycelium to “weave” a basket-like nest out of straw. This nest was then populated with egg-like objects sculpted from polymer clay. These “eggs” each reference other biological materials or processes. They appear here out of their typical context, just as basket weaving is not the typical behavior or context of mycelium.
Use different materials to make a color combination mycelium figure.