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Artist Phyllis Ma has spent the last year helping mushrooms find their light. After foraging them or sourcing species grown by the urban farm Smallhold, she carefully transports the fungi to her workspace, where she arranges and photographs them on bright backdrops alongside bodega flowers, fruits, and colorful powders (matcha, turmeric). The result—a set of brilliant, characterful still lifes—is packaged in zines entitled Mushrooms Friends, the second of which launched with a party at the Brooklyn meadery Honey’s on Friday.
Ma came across her fungal muse while searching for a sustainability-focused project last summer. A friend connected her to Smallhold, and during a visit to the farm, she was enchanted by the visual of mushrooms growing under purple lights. She’s since made mushrooms a focus of her travels, foraging in the Swiss mountains and Berlin’s Grunewald Forest and on the Oregon coast. “It really puts a new spin on rainy days for me,” she notes of mushroom hunting. “It’s optimistic for me now, because I’m like, Ooh, I wonder what’s growing.”
Some of the zine’s featured specimens were found closer to Ma’s Ridgewood home, in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery. Her hope is that when people discover her photographs they will “see that you don’t have to be a mycologist to appreciate mushrooms. We can learn so much from mushrooms, just the way they collaborate with trees and other plants.” Her portfolio is a mesmerizing introduction to a kingdom whose great potential is only now going mainstream, as the ecological and psychological benefits are being reconsidered through new applications and studies.
Ma’s environmental interest extends to her closet, where most of her wardrobe is vintage or homemade. A stint at fashion school taught her how to design a few key pieces, and now she aims to make at least half of her clothes. Her photographic aesthetic is reflected in the vibrancy of her everyday outfits—and, of course, her shock of Sonic the Hedgehog–hued hair, which she dyed after a breakup. Here, Ma shares a few of her favorite ensembles during a creative day in New York City.
