Mushroom Dyes

(via allfiberarts.com)

(via the Fungi and Fiber Symposium 2008 website)

During Sasha Duerr's lecture at our symposium yesterday, she talked about using mushrooms (and really, a whole bunch of other interesting plants and seeds) to dye fabric. These colors are amazing, and I was thinking about it a lot yesterday - how can I learn more about this, and how can I get these mushrooms? I guess there's some lady in Finland who teaches workshops (the image above came from her class), but there are some locals who seem to know a lot too. I found the Sonoma County Mycological Association's website and it has some great info. Their colors look a little more earthy than the ones Sasha showed, but I guess you have to start with what's locally available.

Lauren Parent

Postcard for 2008 Open Studio

I saw Lauren Parent's recent work at CCA's open studio day a few weeks back, and it's beautiful. I've been lucky enough to see her work slowly evolve over the past year or two - from her initial sculptures in foam core to abstract line-based works on vellum, and now to these newer charcoal drawings - and each step seems like a movement in a long song. I see the main theme, the deconstruction of that theme, and its greatly abstracted inverse, and despite these very different tempos, I see a constant perspective. I guess I am arbitrarily deciding where the song began (with the foam core sculptures), but stick with me here.

Duck Island, 2007

If you've ever worked with foam core or done any modelmaking for architecture, you might understand the technical skill and unbending patience required to make "Duck Island." My favorite part is the bird in the air - it's crazy to see all of the perfectly placed layers. I like the relation of the animals to the landscape, and the pixelization/stratification that comes from using linear building materials. Lauren's background in landscape design really shows here, from her material choice to her subject matter. I especially like the uniform color - a stark white, a sterile and hard-edged interpretation of nature. Foam core might be the least natural material out there, but when you see this piece you immediately say "nature scene" in your head.

Postcard, 2007

Here's the second movement in the symphony: a deconstruction, a hint at how the initial piece was made. I think this is my favorite part, because the shapes form these amazing positive and negative spaces. The nature scene is broken down into an entirely unrecognizable form, clinically dissected into its components. This image also gently pokes fun at the DIY trend...who would want to make a foamcore duck at home? What would it mean when taken out of the context of art?

How to Make a Sculpture of a Pile of Foam Core, 2007

The image above shows a composition of all of the scraps left over from cutting out the ducks. This is where Lauren's work shifts its focus from the object to the waste, playing on the inverse of her abstraction. These shapes are unintentional, and maybe they're more engaging because they weren't formed consciously. They are just as precisely cut as the duck landscape because they are the other half of the puzzle - so this isn't a matter of sloppy scraps being tossed together. I like how many pieces there are, and their range of size and shape keeps my eye moving around the image. I am reminded of abstract textile designs, of the playful experiments of the Bauhaus gang, and of the order one can create from chaos. Even cooler, the photo above represents only one aspect of this piece - as Lauren placed these pieces on the floor in the Knave area of CCA's San Francisco campus, people gathered around to watch her and it became an impromptu performance. It's always engaging to see another person making decisions and working on a puzzle with no distinct parameters , but I think it was especially interesting because her audience was entirely made up of artists. I can imagine them all having opinions about where the pieces should go, trying to justify why one piece belonged in a spot. It may have not been a spoken conversation, but I'm fairly sure the whole group was involved in the disussion in some capacity.

Remnants of Sculpture (Foam Core), 2007

The foam core scraps moved back into Lauren's studio and cluttered up a corner, not ready to be dumped. She sketched the pile, starting off with identifiable pieces tumbling and tangling amongst themselves, and later abstracting them to curves and lines floating in cloudy areas of charcoal.

Remnants of Drawing (Tubing and Handprints), 2007

I really enjoy watching the back-and-forth play of 2-D and 3-D within her work: dimensional piles drawn flatly and abstractly, 3-D objects flattened into pattern pieces and then cut and assembled to make different 3-D objects, 3-D scraps photographed to flatten them back into a 2-D plane. Lauren's final pieces, a series of 16 large drawings hung at the CCA grad show, continue the 2-D abstracted theme of "Remants of Drawing." In my mind these abstract shapes echo the clutter in my life - the voice mail messages, old batteries, loose change, unworn socks in the back of the dresser drawer, piles of paperwork, traffic sounds, flickering lights - all of the things left in our minds at the end of the day. These cluttery bits are striking because they are complex, approaching all senses. And in the end, I'm not sure that I want these things out of my mind - they're so comforting and familiar, regardless of their girth or volume or intensity.