(ABOVE) Artist Chris Ritson created this living work, “Mushroom Picture,” by infusing a block of saw-dust with a bracket fungus, Pycnoporus sanguineus, collected near his home in the rainforest of Tantalus, above Honolulu.
Chris Ritson aims to grow as an artist-literally. Turned off by the environmental impact of traditional art materials, Ritson set out to make art that "contributes positively to the environment, not harms it."
Growing up close with his grandfather, a particle physicist, and influenced by his mother who "was very into art," Ritson's sensibility was shaped by "an appreciation for aesthetics and the subtle forces of nature," he says. He started by growing crystals, but while they were beautiful he wasn't satisfied. Intrigued by working with living things, he searched his own backyard in the lush, mountaintop jungle of Tantalus above Honolulu, and discovered mushrooms. The more he explored, the more they fascinated him. "Mushrooms are some of the biggest organisms in the world, with networks that can span miles underground, connecting valleys and forests," he says. "They make complex, weblike threads called mycelium, by which they communicate via electrical impulse, like a brain. Genetically, they're closer to animals than to plants."
They are also beautiful. Working in a sterile lab he built himself, Ritson takes a sample of mushroom and places it in a Petri dish with a gel of seaweed and sugar, then adds it to blocks of sawdust he makes from invasive species of trees. The blocks become canvases; when the mushrooms fruit, they create their own masterpieces, like the bright orange fans of a polypore spreading like ripples of water. Ritson's most recent forage, a brown mushroom he thought was Ganoderma australe, the southern bracket fungus, turned out to be a species yet unidentified by science. As mushrooms grow, he monitors their development for contamination by other fungi or bacteria, which can devastate months of work in one day. Each of his fungal art pieces takes four to five months to complete.
Sometimes Ritson uses directs airflow to influence the growth. Most recently, he places face-shaped frames, fake eyes and teeth for the mushrooms to grow over and around, eerily fleshlike in texture and appearance. "I like the temporal nature of adding portraiture to it," he says. While Ritson can embalm the finished pieces in wax to make them permanent, most are destined to become compost, which he reuses.
"Typically, art is used to communicate the intent of the artist. But with generative art, the autonomous system of the material becomes the creator, not the artist's decisions. Ultimately, the credit goes to the organism."
Instagram: chrisritson
