INTERVIEWS
An interview with Julie Beeler, creator of the Mushroom Color Atlas
Bio
Julie Beeler is a designer, artist, author and educator with a deep love and curiosity for the natural world. She created the Mushroom Color Atlas to grow her work and passion to benefit what she values most: education, creativity, collaboration, community, and the environment. It has been recognized internationally in publications including Popular Science, Surface Design Association, Seattle Times and the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. She has written articles for The Mushroom, Tauko and the upcoming Mushroom Color Atlas book will be released by Chronicle Books in Fall 2024. Julie’s work is featured in a broadcast of “Oregon Art Beat” profiled by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Her textile work has been exhibited nationally and featured in Embroidery out of the UK. For seven years she was on the faculty of Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art & Craft in Portland, OR. When she is not out foraging you can find her tending to her flower farm Bloom & Dye, working in her art studio, or leading workshops.
Interview with Julie Beeler, creator of the Mushroom Color Atlas
– How did the idea of developing the Atlas come about?
We had been through the thick of the pandemic, although it was far from over, and we were starting a new calendar year. It was January 2021 and I was thinking through my intentions for the upcoming year, reflecting on what I value most and how I wanted to make the most of my time in the year to come. I had been spending a lot of time with my fungi friends, doing different experiments and tests on how to extract different colorants and pigments, creating a series of artworks in my studio, teaching educational workshops and making mushroom color charts.
At the same time I had just retired from teaching in higher education so I was thinking about ways to fill that gap. I conceived of the Mushroom Color Atlas as an opportunity to provide an online educational resource about how to work with and use mushrooms for color. It was the perfect combination of bringing together my love of science, art and education as well as integrating elements of my former professional career of creating interpretive, interactive media apps, websites and installations.
– How was the creative process?
The process of creating the Mushroom Color Atlas was, and still is, one of the most rewarding of my life. I am always in awe working with the mushrooms, the surprise and delight of what they have to offer us, how they reveal their colorants and the transformative process of making the dyes and pigments is very grounding. Working with Brad Johnson @bradjohnson, Danny Rosenberg and Yuli Gates @healthycraft was the assembly of my dream team. Their passion and dedication to helping realize the Atlas was more than I could ever have imagined. I am a nerd at heart and loved cataloging, organizing and documenting the archive into an online database as well as making all the different art and images to bring it to life.
– What would you like to convey to the community about the Fungi Kingdom? Any teaching on mushrooms that you would like to pass on?
The Mushroom Color Atlas is a resource and reference for everyone curious about mushrooms and the beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms. But it is also the start of a journey and a point of departure, introducing people to the kaleidoscopic fungi kingdom and their connection to it.
My hope is that through the Atlas everyone will be inspired to learn more about the mycological world, and begin to understand the importance of the networks, connections and symbiotic relationships that live in our forests. Most importantly, understanding our impact on these delicate networks and our role as stewards of the land, bringing positive change to our local environments and our planet.
– What is your favorite fungi? and why?
This is an impossible question for me to answer! Every mushroom is my favorite! 🙂 It is even hard for me to narrow it down to a favorite genus, but for the sake of answering the question, I think my favorite fungi genus are Hydnellums. These are tooth fungi that contain a very special pigment compound found nowhere else in nature. Terphenylquinones are only found in mushrooms! And even more amazing is that they produce blue, green and purple dye. Blue is a very rare color to get from natural dyes, the most known being indigo, but these Hydnellum mushrooms offer us a range of natural blues. Plus they are absolutely spectacular, other wordly mushrooms for which I often find myself gazing at them for extended periods of time. They sparkle and glisten on the forest floor, often dripping with red guttation oozing out of their caps which has earned Hyndellum pecki its common name ‘bleeding tooth.’
