Vital Twilight is 3D rendered and framed (18”x24”) snapshot of an imagined art installation. The frame is referential to the imagined installation with sculpted oyster and button mushrooms "growing" out of its wood construction.
Decomposition, and the organisms that thrive from the process, has long been a motif that has fascinated me. The life that grows in this way is as close to the concept of an afterlife that you can touch- and mushrooms really are beautiful.
The imagined installation consists of life sized human figures carved out of wood, colonized with mushroom spores, housed in a large greenhouse-gallery, and left to grow. While the scale may be unobtainable, mostly because harvesting a tree large enough to carve human figures out of would be unethical, I have been experimenting with growing oyster mushrooms for a potential small-scale time-lapse film.
