For Instructions for Unmaking with Ash at the Discovery Museum, World Forestry Center, we worked between desert and forest to treat art-making as ritual, research, and repair. Sculptural forms woven from invasive blackberry and English ivy were inoculated with fungi to begin decomposition and soil repair, their nests cradling native seeds and site soils for eventual reintroduction into degraded or burned ground. Fungal species are sourced, cultured and inoculated on site. With these fungal worlds we tended living nurse plants, and as each outgrew the museum and was transplanted into riparian landscapes, we replaced them with an ink-painted ghost, an archival trace of something once cared for here and now living beyond the institution's walls. Exhibition curated and cared for by Stephanie Bailey.

 

This work is now connected to a site specific human sized nest that lives on the Reed College campus, built from a downed Cedar tree. The nest project was led by housing specialist Amanda Bishop with the assistance of many Reed community members.