Warwick's Mushrooming Art at Fuller Moon Arts Festival
Jenny Torino explored mushrooms and lichens for her Immersive Fungi Forest, debuting at Wickham Works' Fuller Moon Arts Festival this weekend amid an array of art and art forms.
Not only do mushrooms make intriguing art objects, they also network with and nourish trees underground, Jenny Torino found, on her way to constructing her Immersive Fungi Forest art installation for the Wickham Works Fuller Moon Arts Festival this weekend, August 26-27, in Mountain Lake Park. The festival is the last event in August for the Arts, spotlighting Warwick area arts. Music, dance, theater, film and art all have roles in the event.
Torino, who also has a degree in nutrition and dietetics, gravitates to science for her art projects.
“Mushrooms benefit the earth,” Torino said. “They show up in so many shapes and colors, and they’re everywhere, but they’re mysterious.”
On the way to her three feet high papier mache mushrooms, accompanied by a burlap tunnel evoking lichens, she explored mushroom life and the expansion of mushroom uses.
“Mushrooms break down dead plants and animals and leave their nutrients for new plants that animals eat, so they’re essential to the ecosystem,” said Torino. “Mushrooms are the fruiting body of the underground mycorrhizal network, connecting trees and fungi that nourish each other. Through that underground network involving mushrooms, trees send nutrients to saplings that aren’t tall enough for the sun to shine on them for photosynthesis.”
Mushrooms are finding their place in textiles too, Torino noted, with efforts afoot to replace leather, packing and building materials with them.
Mushrooms have also appeared in Torino’s art classes with farmworkers’ children through the Warwick Area Farmworker Organization After School Program.
“The Fuller Moon installment was an extension of work I did for Wickham Works Earth Festival and an after school program for the children of Warwick farmworkers. They made large papier mache mushrooms to display at the Earth Festival and small mushroom dioramas to take home,” said Torino.
The other part of the installment is lichens, whose likeness appears in painted burlap. The fungi and plant kingdom intersect in lichens.
“The skin and inner structure of lichens are made of fungi,” Torino said. They live on surfaces like rocks and bark, walls and roofs, nourished by photosynthesis. Animals, ranging from bats to caribou and deer, eat them and nest and take shelter among them.
To create the mushrooms, Torino “upcycled” a variety of objects and textiles. She used tomato cages to make black trumpet mushrooms and transformed cherry tomato containers to resemble Bleeding Fairy Helmet mushrooms that, when cut, “bleed” a purple-red juice described as latex. With them are Inky Cap Mushrooms that have white caps made of papier mache. Their black drippings were crocheted with black yarn.
Fuller Moon Arts Festival tickets: $15 Adults, $25 2-Day Pass, $10 Children (6-18) & Seniors (65+). More information at FullerMoonArtsFest.Com
https://www.fullermoonartsfest.com/
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