There has not been much making going on recently in my little studio: the roof has been leaking onto the electrics in there and there is some fixing to be done before I can get back to work. In the meantime . . .
If you went down to the woods around the Deerpond recently you would have found yours truly and my other half armed with a large saw and a sack. Sounds suspicious but we had an innocent motive. I have acquired some mushroom spawn and needed some host logs on which to grow my own mushrooms for possible future use in my birch project.
The Towneley woodland management team have been cutting down some birches, the perfect time to gather some logs. All we had to do was carry them home!
Holes drilled, spawn inserted and log number one in the ground. “Why grow your own fungus?” you might ask. Because I love the way that Chinese Canadian artist Xiaoling Yan uses fungal spawn in her work.
Xiaoling Yan
I am fascinated with Yan’s work using the fungus of the Chinese mushroom, the Ling Zhi mushroom. Below is her wall installation made up of bronze cast mushrooms. She uses these as a visual reminder of the sense of loss felt by being separated from loved ones, a common experience of Chinese families separated by the need to work and/or emigrate.
“Ling Zhi” Lonsdale Gallery Toronto Xiaoling Yan exhibition “Where Two Rivers Meet” 2019
In her work “Suspended Silence” she created a series of female heads named “Ling Zhi Girls”, partly referencing the eight immortals of Chinese legend. The heads were made of clay, cast in plaster and then to fibreglass resin moulds. The final extraction from the mould happened while fungal mushroom compound in the mould was still damp. The mushroom fungus was encouraged to grow in the mould and continued producing spores that produced mushrooms and brown powder which slowly engulfs each head.
I would like to experiment in a similar way with mushroom spawn and casting at some point in the future – as I have a fascination for fungi and find Yan’s pieces inspirational, constantly growing and evolving works of art.
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