Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Judith Librach

Beauty

Digital photograph of a mushroom spore print. Spore prints are used to identify types of mushrooms and are saved for future cultivation. Hundreds of thousands of individual, tiny spores make up these intriguing landscapes.

“Once all of its spores fall, a mushroom immediately begins to decompose. As a simultaneous expression of birth and death, these spore prints speak to instinct, ephemerality, and legacy, materially embodying aspects of my experience in middle age. There is beauty in decay.”