news | Living Art & Ecology Lab

Watch Fungal Entanglement: A Lichen Journey

May 28, 2024 | kline.434

Fungal Entanglement: A Lichen Journey, was a participatory performance led by the Lichen Likers art research group. We gathered people on the Ohio State University campus and took them on a journey to visit lichens and learn about their lifestyles. We brought the entire fungal entanglement to the Biological Sciences Greenhouse for an Earth Day art exhibition, In a Hotter House, that included work by the Lichen Likers, students in the Art & Science course (co-taught by faculty members Iris Meier and Amy Youngs), and seven invited local artists.

Credits:

Fungal Entanglement artists: Anna Arbogast, Madison Blue, Alex Buchan, Xiuer Gu, Elias Marquez, Jiara Sha, Doo-sung Yoo, and Amy Youngs.

In a Hotter House exhibition curated by Doo-sung Yoo and Amy Youngs

Artists: Skylar Albright, Anna Arbogast, Marcia Armstrong, Madison Blue, Alex Buchan, Madalyn Bunjevac, Al Dilorenzo, John Cairns, Ben Chang, Megan Fabro, Andie Goodes, Taylor Green, Xiuer Gu, Brennan Jones, Olga Kisseleva and Lilia Chak, Eric Homan, Bethany Marple, Elias Marquez, Andrew Mehall, Caroline Mosholder, Zoe November, Ivan David Ng, Takahiro Okubo, Dev Patel, Noor Quadri, Bakhahang Rai, Mural Remix, Jonathan Riles, Ken Rinaldo, CG Ryan, Bella Saraceni, Lily Schumacher, Sabrina Sedlacko, Jiara Sha, Avery Stratman, Kaika Wakabayashi, Thomas Winningham, Andrew Wood, Uriah Wright, Doosung Yoo, Amy Youngs, Barry Yuan, and Danny Zhang.

Video: Jordan Sommerlad

Music: “Aurora”, by Anemoia. creative commons license cc by-nc-sa

Project support: The Ohio State University’s Humanities Institute, the Living Art and Ecology Lab of the Department of Art, the Biological Sciences Greenhouse, and the Department of Molecular Genetics.

April Workshops: Plant Dye Bandanas with Time for Change

May 7, 2024 | kline.434

April 2nd and April 3rd: Plant Dye Bandanas with Time for Change Week

Time for Change Week is an OSU Signature Event with the purpose of raising awareness for topics relating to sustainability on campus. The Living Art and Ecology Lab hosted two bandana dyeing workshops as part of this year’s festivities. During this event, students used resist techniques to dye bandanas with two historically significant dye plants: indigo and madder root. Enjoy some photos of the student work below!

Bandana reveals from the indigo vat

Madder root dye bath and a madder bandana over-dyed with indigo

Two madder bandanas: one treated with alum and acorn-based tannin solution; another with alum alone

Thank you to Time for Change organizers for including the LAE LAB in this years events!

April Workshops: Mycelium Sculpture with Visiting Artist Kate Klingbeil

May 7, 2024 | kline.434

April 5th: Mycelium Sculpture with Visiting Artist Kate Klingbeil

We had a wonderful crowd in attendance for Kate Klingbeil’s visiting artist talk and sculpture workshop! OSU staff, students, faculty, and community members gathered in the print shop during this event to learn the practice of sculpting with mycelium. Klingbeil, whose work often focuses on celebrating the unseen realm of soil, was drawn to explore this medium for creation as a way of working in partnership with the more than human world. These pieces are a collaboration between the fungi and the sculptor to realize the final product.

Sculpting with mycelium involves the creation of a mold that can be filled with substrate (sawdust, rice bran, etc) inoculated in fungal spawn. As the fungi grow, their mycelium spreads throughout the substrate to act as a ‘glue’, resulting in a form that will hold its shape once removed from the mold. Local waste stream materials– like takeout containers, empty bottles, and cardboard boxes– were provided to participants to make mold shapes. Substrates included soybean chaff, sawdust, hemp hurds, straw, and more. Examples of a student mold (left) and one created by the artist (right) can be seen above.

image of pots and pans in a sink, all full of sterilized substrate materials for using to build mycelium sculptures (eg, sawdust, straw, soybean chaff, etc) — Photo of the ‘Substrate Bar’ full of different materials for growing mycelium and filling our molds

Thank you to Kate for sharing this innovative artistic technique and letting us be part of your fungal network! Anyone interested in organizing a similar workshop with Kate should reach out to her at kateklingbeil@gmail.com. Participant photos from the event can also be submitted to this google form.

We have many people to thank for the execution of this wonderful event. Thank you to Jessie Horning and the Print Studio for providing space for this event to occur. Thank you to Natasha Woods and the Graduate Student Art Club for arranging this visiting artist. Thank you to the Feminist Research, Education, and Engagement (FREE) Center for providing additional funding for workshop materials.

Thank you to the following local partners for donating substrate materials for students to use in this workshop as well: The Cannabis Museum in Athens, Ohio (hemp hurds), Woodcraft on Bethel Road (sawdust), and the McHale Soybean Breeding Program on Waterman Farm (soybean chaff).

Introducing Artist-in-Residence Doo-Sung Yoo

January 2, 2024 | kline.434

Meet the Artist

This past semester the Living Art and Ecology Lab welcomed its first artist in residence, Doo–Sung Yoo. Doo–Sung is a Korean new media artist and a lecturer here at Ohio State University. His work focuses on the interface between the living and non-living aspects of our world. As he describes in the artist statement on his website,

“I create environments in which living entities and biological materials, including the human body, are combined with technological systems. In these environments, my hybrid sculptural and interactive entities mediate the confluence between triangular oppositions of human-animal-technological nature, and blur their boundaries. My artwork is based on those intersections between natural and unnatural technology. I explore aesthetic possibilities of ‘interspecies’ and ‘interanimation’ through human relationships with non-human others within my artistic forms.”

Artist-in-Residence Doo-Sung Yoo in the field, photographing lichen on a tombstone

Doo–Sung’s previous works have been exhibited, reviewed, and published in spaces such as Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader (USA), Life After Literature: Perspectives on Biopoetics in Literature and Theory (Switzerland), Tierstudien (Germany), Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (England), Art and Speculative Futures International Conference 2016 (Spain), Bodies on Stage: Acting Confronted by Technology 2015 (France), Wi: Journal of Mobile Culture (Canada), Intertekst (Poland), and Evolution Haute Couture: Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age (Russia).

Residency Activities

During his residency with the Living Art and Ecology Lab, Doo–Sung has been working alongside OSU Art and Tech faculty Amy Youngs and undergraduate research interns Anna Arbogast, Nathan Tyler, Elias Marquez, Xiuer Gu, and Madison Blue to investigate the lives of lichen. Collectively, this group refers to themselves as the Lichen Likers. Projects and events from this group so far include a ‘lichen garden’ outside of Hopkins Hall, a guest lecture from emeritus professor Robert Klips on lichen natural history, and a virtual reality project to create larger than life models of lichen from 3D specimen scans, among many others.

Doo-Sung standing under an augmented reality model of a lichen specimen. This model was made by the *Lichen Likers* group as a part of their fall research activities.

Lichen Likers will continue to host workshops moving forward, providing space for our human art communities to observe and learn from lichens. They will lead creative activities centered around these symbiotic organisms, with the goal of conceptualizing better ways for including non-human beings in our making practices. Stay tuned to hear more from this group as they continue to embrace the more-than-human world in their craft. A new group of interns will join this project in spring semester, as Doo–Sung’s residency continues through the end of this academic year.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to the lab Doo–Sung!

Workshop Series: Lichen Creation & Ideation

November 13, 2023November 13, 2023 | Amy Youngs

The Lichen Likers* of the Living Art & Ecology Lab will host the second workshop in our series. We are artists learning with lichens, observing and experiencing their symbiotic lifestyle, conceptualizing, and practicing respectful, creative activities with lichens. In this workshop, we invite you to join us in five different hands on activities involving observing, drawing, ideating, mediating, and creating with lichen – in ways that do not harm them.

* The Lichen Likers art research group includes art faculty Doosung Yoo and Amy Youngs and art students Anna Arbogast, Madison Blue, Xiuer Gu, Elias Marquez, and Nate Tyler.

Follow Lichen Likers on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lichenlikers

Materials Matter – tour of exhibition at Wexner Center for the Arts

November 13, 2023November 13, 2023 | Amy Youngs

All are welcome to join a special tour and discussion on Thursday November 16^th, 2 – 4pm. Meet at the entrance of the bookstore of the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Explore the concepts of material sourcing, use, and ethics in artistic practice during a tour and discussion of the Fall 2023 exhibitions.

Where do artists get their materials from and why does it matter? What are the ethical considerations behind their use and display? Featured artists include Harold Mendez, Jumana Manna, and Sahar Khoury. This dialogue is a collaboration of the Learning & Public Practice at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the OSU Living Art and Ecology lab.