Mushroom & Friends Issue 4 is available now on loremnotipsum.com. Featuring still lifes of Ganoderma mushrooms cultivated by the artist Phyllis Ma. Ganoderma, a type of fungus that parasitizes hardwood trees, is a popular medicinal mushroom in East Asia. For this project, the specimens were grown in a small home lab, where some formed marshmallow-tipped antlers, and others, fan-like conks with porous undersides. In addition to photography, this issue includes a short essay tracing the cultural history of Ganoderma in China — from medieval Daoism to the contemporary art of mushroom bonsai.
Discover Mushrooms & Friends – Issue 4.
Mushroom & Friends is a publication from Phyllis Ma, a New York-based artist working in still life photography and animation. She was a co-founder of LAZY MOM, a food art collaboration active from 2014–2018. The second installment of Phyllis Ma’s magazine expands on the photography of foraged and cultivated mushrooms in phantasmagoric settings. Familiar gilled mushrooms are featured alongside spongy, stalkless and club-like fungi. The collection is then juxtaposed with visceral props – a sliced orange powdered with tumeric, purple daisies on green sugar, the veiny texture of a cabbage leaf – and transformed into otherworldly, Dr. Seussian assemblages.
Content
Ganoderma, a type of fungus that parasitizes hardwood trees, is a popular medicinal mushroom in East Asia. For this project, the specimens were grown in a small home lab, where some formed marshmallow-tipped antlers, and others, fan-like conks with porous undersides. In addition to photography, this issue includes a short essay tracing the cultural history of Ganoderma in China — from medieval Daoism to the contemporary art of mushroom bonsai.
Details: Mushrooms & Friends – Issue 4
32 pages, 28 × 21.5 cm, Softcover






