The first step on this journey, from an artistic practice point of view, was to learn how to cultivate the mycelium. They make it look very easy on the internet. This is a lie. What is easy, is growing mold.
This is my first major mould fail. I was extremely upset.
Although I trained as a scientist, I hadn’t done much in the way of culturing micro-organisms myself, and I didn’t have a lab bench set up anywhere, so it was all a bit ad hoc. There were plenty of mold fails, precious little mycelial growth and a lot of questioning my life choices.
In the early stages I learned that you really do need a reliable sterilisation system (a pressure cooker is good) and a heat source to keep your mycelium at a cosy 25 degrees celcius. I also learned new ways to cook mushrooms, and that spore prints are beautiful! So it wasn’t all bad.
It took me over 4 months to produce anything remotely like the mycocomposite materials that I was aiming for.
These are my first Blue Oyster Mycelium/Rye grain/recycled paper pellet bricks.
They were nothing like the ‘hard as concrete’ I’d read about on the internet.
Disappointed, but not deterred, I persevered……
Me & My Microbes 