Harmony McNish

Mushroom Field Study

Mushroom Field Study is a series of hand-painted wood carvings to documentation the diversity of mushrooms found on a fall foray.

“Mushroom Field Study is a series of handcrafted wooden mushrooms that has developed through my many hikes in wooded areas. I think what initially drew my attention to mushrooms is my clumsiness while walking in the woods. I am prone to tripping, so I have accustomed my eyes to scanning the ground instead of the sights in front of me. The purpose of the multiple mushroom replicas is to aid in learning how to identify mushrooms that grow wild on my family's homestead property, in the early season of fall. Although identification is important in this project, I am an amateur mushroom forager and deeply struggled in finding sources to accurately identify the mushrooms I found within my many field study hikes. What I discovered was the mushrooms' individual markings often prevented me from determining the species' name. The connectedness to Mushroom Field Study to my art practice is my ongoing exploration of the sense of home. I am fascinated by mushrooms' ability to “pop-up” overnight and flourish in their rooted homes for short seasons before they disappear to their next cycle. I also connect the practice of foraging for mushrooms to homestead and frontier ways of living as mushroom picking can be a sustainable option to providing food. As I complete the works of Mushroom Field Study I feel a sense of profoundment to the diversity of mushrooms and realize my work on this topic has just gestated. ”