Our young traveller, mushroom, begins her documentation around this strange abandoned town. Decaying before our very eyes as Mush and Earth overtake and consume the environment around mushroom. The process to document such changes are a feat of themselves, but what little souvenirs they were able to gather from the sites were worth it. 

The MushRoom Collection represents a lot of the struggles I’ve had to overcome as an artist as far as my own insecurities towards my work goes. A love and appreciation for two very different mediums is part of the fabric that lines this project; as digital illustrations have been a long standing part of my practice, but I found a deep interest in papermaking through printmaking. 

Over the course of the past year or so, part of what has been the driving force behind my pieces have been finding ways to combine a part of my practice that I consider my comfort and my home, with another part that allows for a lot of physical experimentation, as well as translating those works to a digital format. This is also why the main themes of the MushRoom collection revolve growth and decay of the digital image as well as organically. Within the spaces that mushroom navigates consists collages of different images and sites of abandoned buildings and watercolour paint textures. The use of abandoned buildings as the site for the space that mushroom navigates illustrates the spaces in which abandoned buildings and towns inhabit; dying or deserted of inhabitants but somehow still overgrown and containing it’s own narrative. Through the use of an Artificial Intelligence learning software called Playfor, thousands of different blends of images were collapsing and growing into one another to create the base of the spaces that mushroom tours. Afterwards, I play with the idea of digital decay further through the method mentioned prior, creating digital paintings on top of it and superimpose images of the paper that I made throughout the digital collages. The growth aspects come from not only the the vegetation that sprouts up throughout the different environments and mushroom themself, but also the animations paired with each of mushroom’s framed photos. As the scene comes to life in these AI animated paintings it becomes a true cycle of decay and regrowth. 

Overall, the MushRoom Collection really highlights the personal struggle that I have had with my art practice, throughout my academic career. Showing how while I will find my own working in potential state of decay, that there is always something interesting to find and explore through something abandoned.