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March 2008: Linda Armstrong

Casting Mushrooms in a New Light

Linda Armstrong is the director of the Emory Visual Arts Program, where she has taught for the past 15 years. Her installation, Collecting Excursions, will be on view at the Emory Visual Arts Gallery from March 20 through April 24, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 20 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. There will be a special Earth Day reception for Emory Friends of Visual Arts on Tuesday, April 22 at 7:00 pm, featuring an artist talk and music by Klimchak. For more information visit www.visualarts.emory.edu or call 404-727-6315.

When Linda Armstrong is not teaching classes for the Emory Visual Arts Program or working on her next exhibition in her sculpture studio in Atlanta’s Grant Park, you may find her hiking through the woods with The Mushroom Club of Georgia, clutching a well-worn copy of the Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Mushrooms. Some of what the club members find on their excursions become an evening’s dinner or the subjects of journal pages; Linda is probably the only one in the group who uses some of her findings in art exhibitions.

“My fascination with mushrooms began in 2001 at Hambidge, Georgia’s oldest artist residency center,” she says. “During walks around my cabin I saw lots of mushrooms and began to teach myself how to identify the ones I could eat safely. As the saying goes, all mushrooms are edible – once!” Further research revealed to Linda the long and often mysterious history of mushrooms, from the ancient Greek belief that they were manifestations of Zeus’s lightening because they appeared after rain, to their present day allure as both culinary enhancements and fungi phenomena that appear suddenly and often in places where they have never been seen before.

For Linda, the transition of mushrooms from food to art happened by accident that same year at Hambidge: “Rather than discard some inedible mushrooms, I weighted them down on rice paper before I went to bed one night; the next morning I found that the mushrooms had made interesting “drawings” with their fluids on the paper. I loved the idea that I had coaxed out their juices to allow the mushrooms to make their mark.”

Another pivotal moment in Linda’s career came in 1990 during a visit to Cumberland Island, Georgia's largest and southernmost barrier island known for its undeveloped landscape. While enjoying a walk along one of the island’s pristine beaches, she encountered a dead dolphin that had washed up on the shore. “One moment I was savoring my solitude in an idyllic place, and then the next moment I was confronted by the disturbing image of a dead animal, which I later learned was a victim of an immune deficiency disease caused by pollution,” she recalls. “Environmental beauty and degradation had collided to form my memory of that place.” Subsequently Linda began to notice other ways that human intervention impacted the natural environment, from Mylar balloons that washed ashore on Cumberland’s beaches from cruise ships, to other animals that had succumbed to death by pollution. Dismayed and charged with new ideas, her work changed, and she began a series of installations using the evocative qualities of discarded materials and island detritus to illustrate the results of many years of both natural and human-inflicted change on Cumberland Island.

Around the same time as her epiphany with the dolphin, Linda saw an exhibition by Wolfgang Laib, a German artist who collected pollen for his art installations in the meadows and forests surrounding his studio: “I can remember being drawn into the gallery by the amazing yellow glow from the sculptural forms made of pollen. Then the realization that such an atypical, environmentally-based art material was on display in a New York gallery expanded the possibilities of content for me and inspired me to continue to pursue the use of objects from the environmental world to communicate my artistic ideas.”

Linda’s exhibition at the Emory Visual Arts Gallery, Collecting Excursions, will be a culmination of many years of environmental research and experimentation within Georgia, as well as an exploration of tree bark and mushroom specimens she collected while participating in a residency at the Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers in South Africa. “Transporting foreign bark and mushrooms back to the United States can be tricky,” she remembers with a smile. “I sometimes feel like an artist outlaw.” In addition to the specimens from South Africa, the exhibition will examine the relationship between trees and mushrooms through the inclusion of a dead tree that Linda found in Grant Park: “The tree was a victim of Atlanta’s recent drought, but through bandages and a symbolic healing ritual, I will give gallery visitors the opportunity to experience a revitalized tree in a way they have never seen before.”

Collecting Excursions will also be Linda’s first exploration of bronze casting. She created molds of mushrooms she collected and then handed them over to a master caster and mold builder in Utah to capture the delicate nuances and patterns of the original molds. This process is very expensive, particularly for the bronze itself, and she would not have been able to do it without the support of an Emory URC grant this year. “The results are temporary mushroom blooms solidified in bronze, making them timeless,” she explains. “I am thrilled with how they turned out, and am extremely grateful to the URC for facilitating this unique form of research.”

With the significant work required to plan and install Collecting Excursions, combined with the demands of a full teaching schedule, Linda has not had as many opportunities to visit her beloved Cumberland Island as she would like. But she’s not complaining: “Teaching is an art form equal to my own production,” she explains. “I love working with students, and teaching them feeds my work. More time to devote to my own projects and to travel would be ideal, but I would not trade that for the time with my students.” Not to worry, however, as she won’t be away from her muse for long: as soon as the exhibition at the Emory Visual Arts Gallery is over she will be back on Cumberland Island, walking on the beaches, enjoying a feast of non-poisonous mushrooms (chanterelles and morels are her favorites), and finding inspiration for her next project.

[IMAGE: Linda Armstrong with her mushroom molds, February 2008. Photo by Lisa Alembik.]

Written by Mary Catherine Johnson

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