‘We are all going to be mushroom fertilizer’, this title in itself is evocative of imageries of the body, our bodies, merging together with nature in its final resting state. As comical or absurd as the title may sound, it conjures up a reality that many of us deny until the last days of our living life. Our intellect, physicality and biology inform us that our human existence will come to an eminent death and that all living matter will inevitably meet its end. However, ‘We are all going to be mushroom fertilizer’ has not given focus to the despondency of death but rather its ‘living’ components.
The project consisted of three parts in different locations around Falland. The first is a table setting of several homemade items which greet the arrival of the public by the entrance at the barn. On the tables are freshly baked sourdough bread; a range of locally salvaged black and red currant plants found in surrounding areas of Falland and organic ginger plants; seed packets of rucola and sunflower and warm potato and leek soup. The second site which is ten meters away shows three grave-like mounds on the grassy lawn. The first mound shows carefully planted sunflowers that have not reached their full blossom form. The second is covered with weeds and the last mound is an area of 90 x 200cm of flattened dead grass surrounded by tall green grass. The final site is in walking distance and under the protective grove of the lilac bushes. By the brook that steers runoff water away from the house, a human-form on the overgrown grass, lays lifeless and still. The form is outlined by small twigs which delineates the ground as its orderly placement gives it distinction from its rambling surroundings. Upon closer inspection the entire form is filled with mulched woodchip that carefully placed to ‘colour in’ its outline. Unbeknownst to onlookers, underneath the thick layer of woodchip and upturned grass soil is a mass of white cap mushroom spawn spread throughout and awaiting to sprout at the right conditions. The mushroom sprouting did not happen that day nor the day or month after that. And as with the other two sites of ‘We are going to be mushroom fertilizer’, time has affected the appearance and its outcome. The sourdough breads have all been eaten and digested; the berry plants are planted into the ground; the seed packets sown; the sunflower had blossomed and died; the flattened grass now grown over again.
‘We are all going to be mushroom fertilizer’, is not a visually alluring or seductive work. It may not even be seen as an artwork. However, it is an important beginning to a new practice that attempts to merge the everyday living together with my art practice. It is a calling for a harmonised existence where like many ancient indigenous cultures of the past had not separated daily living with creative life. Where all levels of food preparation was vital to and for bodily survival as well as spiritual. The preparation of food is, not as we now understand it, confined to the kitchen but was far more involving which followed nature and the weather from the planning of hunting and growing seasons to harvesting and storing rations for the winter. This is a cyclic practice and is involving and consuming. And woven into these daily activities are creative skills to enhance and assist. The creative activities could almost be understood as punctuations in the rhythmic of the day. These activities give meaning and are a part of the daily preparations.