These last few weeks in residency have been a rush, both in terms of pacing and emotion. I have been earnestly trying to make visual art for the first time. I've felt stuck writing, so opened up the process to a co-collaborator, the golden oyster mushroom. I specifically wanted to work with the golden oyster because it reminds me of me: an invasive species from northern China that has since gone "feral" in the United States. Apparently, it was also recently spotted as far west as Alaska.

I remembered how Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote the matsutake in her genius book, The Mushroom at the End of the World. The way the mushrooms would rupture the earth—mycelium growing ferociously underground until their fruiting bodies spring up with enough force to move concrete, seemingly randomly, along invisible-to-us faultlines. She describes the matsutake’s preference for growing in the ruins, their inability to be commercially cultivated.

Much of my work so far feels predicated on an experience of rootlessness, of geographic agnosticism and lack of commitment. I feel drawn to philosophies of displacement, disembodiment, deterritorialization, and virtuality because they seem like a way to reframe these feelings I have and turn them into something worth holding on to. As I write, I can feel myself working to erase—to protect—the character of the narrator, until their voice inevitably comes bursting through, and the balance of protection and vulnerability is preserved. In this way, perhaps, it makes deep sense that I've been drawn to the mushroom, something so deeply rooted, and so powerfully connected to the physical.

Though the golden oyster is commercially cultivatable and a robust grower, I still hoped that it might anchor me, teach me about fruiting / making art / self-realizing as a precarious process, accidental, non-scalable, uncontrollable. I suppose I was imagining mushroom as a kind of connective tissue, a way to sculpt, to bind, and to hold things together. I had forgotten that a mushroom also indicated decay.

connect

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