Damp Designs 2009 – 2011

Though these photos are scattered through my previous posts I thought showing them together would be a good way of putting across, or explaining, how I hope my work will progress. The cleaner/pinker photos were taken in 2009, my first visit inside Castle Dillon, the darker lot are from different times this year. It shows the way the damp has caused this fungus to spread. Obviously this is devastating to the building but it is such  beautiful devastation.

All photographs and illustrations are © Sarah Hutchinson Burke – Please do not use without permission.

Mushrooms, Fungus & Spores

While I’m waiting for the grass and moss to grow, which seems to be a lot similar to watching paint dry, I collected a few mushrooms which are always easily spotted at this time of year. The different varieties are amazing, these are probably not just as unhealthy as whatever is growing on the walls of Castle Dillon. I’m not ready to ‘grow’ mushrooms/fungus yet as I need to do an awful lot more reading on the subject but I have just purchased a small grow kit and my experiments with that will be blogged as soon as they happen.

I used these mushrooms for spore prints, spores are essentially the seed of mushrooms – the most simple explanation. Wonderful to look at, these have been preserved with fixative so I presume this will also stop them from sprouting up in the middle of my sketchbook.

The blue tint on these mushrooms made it impossible for me not to experiment with some watercolour illustration. I have been thinking of keeping a personal diary of plants that I work with in and around Castle Dillon, much like a botanic journal but kept solely for a personal reason.