Becoming Materially Aware with Mushrooms: A Sociomaterial Analysis of Biomaking

Biomaking and other bio-oriented creative approaches are beginning to gain traction in education. Operating at the intersections of arts and sciences, they represent a field of integrative practices that involve creative making with the biological. In educational contexts, however, bio-oriented creative practices have been studied primarily from hylomorphic perspectives that do not account for the roles of different non-human organisms or other materials that participate in the processes. Drawing on theories of sociomateriality and material agency, and utilising multispecies microethnography, the paper attends to the specificities of making, makers, materials and artefacts in biomaking. It explores a case of a Finnish upper secondary school workshop implemented as part of the school's art curriculum within a larger educational development initiative. In the workshop, makers engaged with webcap mushrooms to extract, use and experiment with their pigments. The analysis builds on constructed operational sequences of the workshop activities, and a scrutiny of their interconnections, stages and participants. The paper shows how making, emergent artefacts and interplays of makers’ intentions and materialities can instate moments of relationality and learning, and thus build makers’ material awareness of the more-than-human organisms around them. The study proposes making with the biological as an attunement to our enmeshment with the environment.