(New work in Progress)
The Mythology of Mushrooms
I am fascinated by mushrooms and have been photographing them for years. The mythology around them is vast, their forms are numerous, and their uses are wide-ranging…they are ephemeral and insanely fragile but they can cure cancer and alter our state of mind, flavor our foods and stand in for meat products, clean dirty soil and be used as a fuel replacement. When I took all of this into consideration I realized that no medium could be better to print something ephemeral and yet so powerful than the most permanent and noble of metals: Platinum!
“According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Loss Project, we throw away more than 25 percent, some 25.9 million tons, of all the food we produce for domestic sale and consumption…Lead researcher Timothy Jones reported that on average, U.S. households waste 14 percent of their food purchases.” Scientific American, March 2010
This fact astonished me until I looked into my own refrigerator and realized that I was contributing my fair share to this statistic. Beautiful and disgusting simultaneously, this rotten food begs to be used in some way, if not for its original, intended purpose.
