Mei-ling Hom & David McClelland

Artist Statement

Artist/farmers Mei-ling Hom and David McClelland make up the collaborative team Art2grow which creates regenerative sculptural installations to improve soil health using fungi, microbes, and plants. Their biodegradable sculptures are bioforms inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi which enhance and remediate distressed soils by boosting the soil’s microbial communities, making nutrients available to the rhizosphere of vascular plants, improving the soil’s water porosity, and even helping to suppress plant pathogens in the soils. Art2grow intends to create a bioform installation amongst the gardens in and around Marble House to improve soil conditions and to provide aesthetic and edible sustenance for the Marble House community. Because the bioforms have a built in senescence, their legacy will bequeath a healthier more robust soil to support future plantings and to feed future Marble House residents

Mei-ling Hom_Fruiting Mushroom Bump_Straw, sisal twine, oyster mushroom spawn_2013_ 15" x 36" x 36" GroDat Youth Farm New Orleans City Park and Joan Mitchell Center This Mushroom Bump made for the GroDat Youth Farm is an example of how fungi respond to different climatic conditions. At our New York State farm these mushrooms could take nine months to a year to fruit, in the humid warmth of the Louisianna Delta our first harvest of mushrooms appeared in two weeks!

Bio

In the midst of busy careers Mei-ling Hom and David McClelland began a challenging and fascinating pursuit of land stewardship when they acquired an overgrown farm as a place to live while Mei-ling pursued her MFA at Alfred University. They had worked together creating and building large sculptural installations including “Floating Mountains Singing Clouds” at the Smithsonian and “Golden Mountain” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Their research skills had been honed through community art projects such as “Picturing Asian America” at the Headlands Center For The Arts, and in a Fulbright Research Fellowship on Contemporary Korean Ceramics in South Korea. As they alternated between city and country they also completed permanent public art commissions in both Philadelphia (Cloudsphere) and Raleigh Durham (Cloudscape) airports. Living and working with growing crops and forests inexorably led to exploring the complicated web of fungi, archaea, bacteria, and green plants which sustain life on this planet. As the collaborative team Art2grow they launched into projects combining aesthetic invention with regenerative growing practices to create living sculptures which become soil amendments and growth stimulants as they pass through their lifecycles. Growing art installations at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky and the BigCi Art Center in the Blue Mountains of Australia have afforded them extraordinary opportunities to deepen their horticultural knowledge, to create site installations tailored to hyper local conditions, and to establish bonds between art and farming communities.

meilinghom.com