Description
This artwork is a collection of small brown mushrooms from the garden picked during February when the weather was so wet, windy and cold. It took me a month to gather all the mushrooms. I am not sure of what exactly is here but there are definitely some Hygrocybe, Tricholoma & Cortinarius sp. included. I love these LBM’s because I am never sure if their pale gills are going to produce brown or white spores.
Like a fingerprint, each mushroom has its own unique pattern which ebbs as it ages. This painting is absolutely original and unique.
Gillian Duggan creates unique paintings using wild mushrooms and her passion for nature and art is visible in her work.
Working with her garden mushrooms, she harnesses their spore dispersal action to create these individual patterns. Some patterns are mirror images of the mushrooms’ gills and others are more abstract when she adds air currents to the process creating a sense of movement, fluidity and, sometimes, playfulness.
Her work reflects the juxtaposition of decay and life, stillness and motion as nature shapes the world we inhabit. Mushrooms and fungi recycle the dead and resupply the building blocks of life. Nothing is ever still. Motion is everywhere.
Each piece of Gillian’s work is unique and original.
Her medium is spores which are dried, fixed, framed, sealed and ready to hang.
Gillian lives in the foothills of the Dublin mountains surrounded by trees, birds, wild animals and, of course, mushrooms.
The Sea 
Meadows