Gilded Fungal Flowers Bio Quilt
Blending the familiar with the foreign/Bioquilts grown from material memory and culture
Gilded Fungal Flowers is a grown assembly bioquilt that draws inspiration from family gatherings and materials anchored in stories of place. It is made of mycelium grown in local waste stream cocoa bean husks (from the Dandelion Chocolate factory), chitin bioplastic, kombucha leather grown in cactus fruit picked nearby, and seaweed from a local Japanese market. These materials represent a blending of communities I am connected to. I grew up making soups with the seaweed included in this piece. My grandma taught me how to rinse the dried seaweed, and tie it into a chain of knots as we “talked story” and cut them into short sections to drop into boiling water. The constellations of this knotted kombu seaweed stitched into this piece are an homage to the constellation of stories that populate my memory of food foraging and cultural food prep on Maui.
This bio tapestry will inform the experimental community collaborative BioQuilts project which I will conduct with the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles in January -March 2021. BioQuits aims to elevate community voices as drivers of questions regarding the future of sustainability design and bioengineering by inviting people to make their own quilt units grown from locally sourced natural materials and to tell their own stories. It blends the familiar concept of quilt squares with the more unfamiliar process of growing biomaterials from locally sourced biocultures and biomass feedstock. Communities engaged will be Japantown, the Mayfair Latinx community, and Little Saigon of San Jose, California. The project will culminate in three bioquilts stitched and grown from the community creations.
As we move into an increasingly biologically complex future, healthy communities will be the ones that foster community conversations at the intersections of art, sustainability, and science. A core goal of the project is to empower and engage people through their existing cultural knowledge and expand our collective idea of what sustainable biology is, and who owns access to science exploration.
Corinne Okada Takara
Hello! My name is Corinne Takara and I am a San Francisco Bay Area artist/STEAM educator who works with museums and a range of organizations to create workshops that elevate community voices in conversations centered on identity and technology. I conduct workshops on sustainability design and biomaterial design that celebrate existing cultural and community science knowledge. I have mentored two teen Biodesign Challenge teams, the GIY Bio Buddies and CocoBucha. I am a Xinampa Board Member. I develop programming out of my garage makerspace, the Nest.
Recently, I wrote an essay for Biodesigned: What Biodesign Means to Me.
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