Fungus Gen(i)us

Some familiar specimens with a new twist are currently on display at the Dishman Art Museum.

The show features Jasmyne Graybill's mixed media sculptures that the artist fashions after different types of fungi, molds and lichen. Some pieces are natural looking — with intricate designs and realistic colors — while her later works have grown into more vibrant extensions of the found art on which they reside.

The San Antonio artist's exhibition, "Home Sweet Home," is on display through Feb. 23.

Graybill said she first started making her mold-like creations in a series of Petri dishes, creating "organisms" that she painted. Now she uses colored polymer clay. She said her work is influenced by her fascination with nature and our ambivalence toward it.

"On one hand, we vilify it and on the other, we put it on a pedestal," she said. "We idealize nature, we think it is this wonderful thing — until there is mold growing in the refrigerator — or until shelf mushrooms grow in trees and it costs millions for the lumber industry."

The idea of nature being something we both love and hate is what she is interested in.

"I was really interested in how adaptive nature is — how it seems to continue regardless of what we have to say," Graybill said.

She said that she has a fondness for nature's resilience, creeping into spaces that humans have "cleaned" or "sterilized."

"Nature has a way of infiltrating back into those spaces and reclaiming what we have claimed," she said.

This phenomena is most visible to her in coastal regions, she said, using the example of barnacles growing on objects found in salt water.

"If you look at boat motors that have been left in the water for any period of time, they are just encrusted in barnacles. It is a very unnatural place for a barnacle to be," she said. "So I am interested in this idea of these objects influencing the evolution of nature — how do they adapt to those spaces or on objects or architecture, and how does that change their characteristic?"

Graybill uses found pieces that she purchases from places like the Dollar Store, antique shops or garage sales, and then builds her lichen and fungi out of clay. She said she began working with ‘domestic objects' in 2007.

Graybill packaged, transported and hung the exhibition herself.

"The pieces are actually really fragile," she said, adding that she just didn't feel comfortable shipping them.

"I have also seen people try and hang the work backwards and not understand how it needs to be handled," she said.

Some of the pieces are so fragile that if you were to touch or brush against it, it could collapse or break apart, she said.

Graybill uses the suction of the clay to hold it to the "found" sections of her mixed-media sculptures.

Creating hair-like fungus can be a time consuming task, she said. The pieces have become so intricate that she can no longer estimate how long each piece will take her to finish.

Because the work takes so long, Graybill said she does a large amount of planning and preparation.

"I don't have the time to invest 50 hours in a piece and it not be successful,"  she said. "So I figure out my color scheme and what kind of technique I should use — and I do a lot of little experiments. I make little miniature pieces, of a type of texture or color scheme.

"I bake that and I look at it and I figure out, ‘Is that going to look right? — Is it that going to feel right?'"

She said that her pieces are meant to look as if she has suspended the growth in time — "If I started the clock again, it would just keep growing and growing until it completely encrusted the object or maybe consumed the object."

Graybill wants the viewer to ask questions about the nature of the micro-organisms we live with every day. She has no answers, she said, but hopes the questions evolve — just like the organisms she so faithfully expresses.

For more information, call 880-8137.