Art Forms of Fungi

Fungi commonly pop up in art forms in various kinds. Within pop culture, it can be seen on bags/stickers/shirts, in movies and video games, and commonly when thinking of fairy tales. Within the mushroomer community, people also use mushrooms for various forms of art, from carving into the mushroom itself to using it as a method of creating various textures/colors.

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Some woodworking used spalting as a method to create different colors and designs within the wood. Spalting is “any color in wood that has been produced as a fungal secondary metabolite” (Robinson 2022) which woodworkers use to create beautiful works of art. Spalting has the ability to produce streaks in the wood of the entire color spectrum at various vibrancies (Robinson 2022). Woodworkers will seek out different species of fungus to produce the desired colors and vibrancy. Most of this spalted wood is accumulated through foraging, yet with its popularity, there has been an increasing demand to induce spalted wood through various methods like adding beer or human urine to induce the fungus to produce these secondary metabolites that color the wood (Robinson 2022).