Jella Bertell: ϕκ
💬
Greetings, trawwweller! Why don't you shake off that hurry? Wander around for a while and don't worry. Breathe in, breathe out. Take a long good l👀k around. Zoom in, zoom out. Let your fingers scroll around. In and out, up and down. Shake off the frown! Have a giggle, deep sigh... you'll know when it's time to head back outside.
📝
Mushrooms interest me not only for their culinary qualities, but as a vastly unknown lifeform on this planet. I've foraged and consumed the fruiting bodies of certain mushrooms since childhood - they evoke a sea of cherished memories as I pick and prepare them for a meal. I find it fascinating how the ingredient so familiar and dear to me is merely a small part of an organism that spends most of its existence hidden underground, as a vast network of mycelium.
In this body of work, I've transformed these familiar edible mushrooms into surreal and absurd scenes through a process of macro photography and digital illustration. The images are the result of a process that lasted most of 2024. I was on study leave from my position as an art teacher, trying to slow down from a lifestyle of constant multitasking and overachieving. A slow, seemingly pointless intuitive process was much needed. As an enthousiastic home cook and food photographer, all the various mushrooms that enter my kitchen provided that. I started to take breaks from my daily routine to examine my treasures through a macro lens, lighting them with a handheld flash - sometimes on the kitchen counter, sometimes on the floor. I aimed to capture all the intriguing textures and forms that challenged my perception of the familiar ingredient, before continuing to prepare the mushrooms into an (often quite belated) lunch. Then came the next step: a game of hide and seek!
The game goes as follows:
Pick your partner: an image calling your name amongst the hundreds.
Open it in a digital drawing program such as Procreate.
Draw as many tiny details as needed to reveal the hidden creatures and scenes lurking in the pixel mass.
Do you feel like something's still hiding? Keep going.
Repeat step 3 and 4 again and again until you get bored, an urgent adult matter interrupts the game.
Move on to the next image. Repeat steps 2-5.
The one rule I set for myself was: don't overthink.
I don't think I quite succeeded in following that rule, but the process has indeed been a lot of fun. I've had many a laugh, as well as that much needed break from functionality and rationality. For a moment I really was quite pleased with my game and that is a big win in my books! However, the human tendency to anthropomorphize the world around us rarely reveals anything about the world, just about ourselves. The longer my game continued, the more I came to realize that I had in fact just spent hours and hours fixated on my mirror image like some sort of Narcissus.
Alas! The mirror ripples. A gentle reminder emerges. An echo of those vast ecosystems we humans rely on, yet know so little about... May they remain untouched, undiscovered and unknown, for as long as we've learned to de-center ourselves.
Jella Bertell is an art teacher, food blogger and food photographer from Helsinki, Finland. She's interested in meaning-making and narratives summoned by details, both in her artistic and culinary practice.
© Jella Bertell 2025. All rights reserved.