Cultivating Physarum polycephalum was a process of chance and observation, relinquishing control and watching how another species develops systems, shares information, the patterns it creates, and the architecture it builds to do so. My microscopic documentation yielded some pretty incredible, otherworldly visuals – at once primordial and futuristic, an elastic sense of time for an organism that can carry us to the deep past and far future Incredibly, this organism is used by scientists to inform their search for dark matter.
I created a set of cloth prints from these images which can be used to wrap and hold item like citrus that tend to mold. These cloths are an attempt to recontextualize mold, an undesirable outcome when storing food, and form a new appreciation for its intelligence, functionality, and even beauty. Molds are foundational organisms that break down matter and return it back to their ecosystems, where it’s stored in the earth, providing nutrients for new things to grow.
I created a set of cloth prints from these images which can be used to wrap and hold item like citrus that tend to mold. These cloths are an attempt to recontextualize mold, an undesirable outcome when storing food, and form a new appreciation for its intelligence, functionality, and even beauty. Molds are foundational organisms that break down matter and return it back to their ecosystems, where it’s stored in the earth, providing nutrients for new things to grow.