"The rain falls and I follow, wandering dirt roads and suburban sidewalks. I scan for luminous Jack O’ Lanterns at the base of trees and Caesar’s Red Cap, emerging egg-shaped from the earth. I approach Destroying Angels with caution and fairy rings with delight. Flamboyant or folksy, mushrooms rely on animals or insects or the wind to carry their seed-like spores to fertile ground. I disperse mushroom spores too, not in a quest to make fleshy toadstools, but to create a two-dimensional image on paper. This artifact is a spore print, used by fungophiles and psilocybin growers for mushroom identification.

The New Herbarium series reimagines the centuries-old process of collecting and preserving plants for science and art. For traditional herbaria, botanical specimens are pressed and arranged on paper. My technique departs from tradition when I place a foraged mushroom, gill-side down, on top of plants, which then serve as stencils. After the billions of spores contained in the gills or pores of the mushroom are released, they fall and mark the paper. Leaf and petal silhouettes are rendered in spores with organic patterns, photographic detail, and in varying textures.

The compositions make visible the ancient and intimate collaboration in which 'plants and mycorrhizal fungi enact a collective flourishing that underpins our past, present, and future' (Sheldrake). Like all herbaria, each image represents a slice of time and place. Leaf shapes reference the process of photosynthesis that ecosystems depend on. The dusty spores conjure fungi’s powers, honed over eons, to pave the way for plant life, to heal and nourish us, and, in some cases, to blow our minds.

Scientists unfurl the mysteries of mycorrhiza, deepening our understanding of the fungi kingdom’s enduring flexibility. Fungi have been solving problems for billions of years through a mutual, but not always equal, exchange with other life forms. I am one of those forms; I gather mushrooms, then create compostable works on paper whose fragility belies fungi’s resilience. The representation of mushrooms in art has often suggested approaching with caution or avoiding altogether, as one should with the treacherous Death Cap. The New Herbarium explores turning towards fungi and their ability to inspire and illuminate."

Read more about the artist's process here.

Source: Merlin Sheldrake. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. New York: Random House, 2020, 126.