October 15. Hands.on.matter: Mycelium and mushrooms. feat. Jessica Langley

Monday, October 15, 19:00
Hands.on.matter: Mycelium and mushrooms. feat. Jessica Langley
Bimonthly program organized by Sandra Nicoline Nielsen and Tim van der Loo

This event will take place at TIER.space and starts with the launch of the event series Hands.on.matter (Sandra Nicoline Nielsen, DK & Tim van der Loo, NL).

^^ Interdisciplinary artist and amateur mycologist Jessica Langley (Colorado, US) presents her work with mushrooms as material input in paper production and shares some of her insights into mycelial properties.

^^^ We will put our hands on mycelium by doing a workshop on how to easily grow our own mushroom culture from the mushrooms we buy in supermarkets. We will provide the needed material.

^^^^ Mushroom snacks will be served as part of the event.

Hands.on.matter is an explorative collective of multidisciplinary creatives focusing on the matter of material through a questioning of resources, consumption, sustainability and culture by generating bimonthly series of expositions, talks and workshops. Hands.on.matter believes in taking a step back and rediscovering the kosmos of matter. We will be building new structures by searching deeper into the essence of material, zooming in on compositions and zooming out on flows. We will discover how design for a more sustainable and circular future can be rediscovered. Hands.on.matter seeks to host thought provoking and desirable templates for design, art and architecture, in the context of everyday life by including local residents like neighbours, entrepreneurs, artists and designers. Every event will be composed of an assembly of expert presentations, hands-on workshops, design showcases as well as refreshments within the given topic of the month. On the 15th of October we will celebrate the decay followed by autumn’s coming by bringing our hands on mushrooms and mycelium. This will be the building block for discovering new materials, forms of assembly, autonomous cultivation and taste.

Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers how cultural symbols of nature and certain representations of landscape are experienced both directly and through the mediated and sublimated image. Using foraged materials, fresco, digital print, sculpture, and collage she is exploring abstraction as a form which dehumanizes place and investigating how the analogous dichotomy of abstraction/representation and the objective/subjective perspectives complicate this relationship. Langley has recently relocated to Colorado where she is the treasurer of the Pikes Peak Mycological Society. She has exhibited her work internationally in such cities as Belfast, Berlin, Mexico City, New York, Reykjavík, and Santa Cruz, as well as being featured in the Pittsburgh Biennial and the Queens International. She has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship and the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation Scholarship for research in Iceland, and she earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She is an amateur mycologist, and her artwork and writings have been published in the New York Mycological Society Newsletter, New American Paintings, NPR, Hyperallergic, and Temporary Art Review. She is co-founder of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run-gallery in Brooklyn, NY; The Stephen and George Laundry Line, a project space in Queens, NY; and The Yard, a site for public art in Colorado Springs.

Tim van der Loo (b. 1991) is an experimental multi disciplinary designer located in Berlin where he is working in between the fields of textile, furniture and illustration. He studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven were he graduated in 2016 and is currently doing a master in Textile and Surface design at Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin. His work engages with sustainable material, contrast, and tactility to generate playful objects.

Sandra Nicoline Nielsen (b. 1988) is a Techno-Anthropologist (Msc.) from Aalborg University, Denmark. She explores how socio-material practices supports transitions into new economies, and has in her Master’s thesis been working with social structures of Circular Economy here in Berlin.

Photos by Benjamin Busch