Soft paper curves into a body, pliable and delicate. Like removed ribs, missing elements in the center let light fall in, creating a play of shadows. Tanja Major’s sculpture, titled Bulge, is delicately attractive and one can guess that it is made of handmade paper. However one feature of the work cannot be as readily guessed: Tanja Major’s paper objects are made of mushrooms.

The Haus des Papiers (House of Paper) has shown Tanja Major’s fascinating works since the opening of the museum in May 2021. The non-profit museum in Berlin, Germany, focuses its collection on sculptural art made of paper and shows the variety of ways in which paper can be processed, reused, or rethought. In this way, Haus des Papiers grows awareness of the often-underestimated material in the visual arts and among the general public. In addition the museum offers visibility to innovations in paper materials, like that of Major’s. Her unusual approach of using fungi to produce paper requires knowledge in mycology and in the art of papermaking, demonstrating an ecological and resource-saving way of producing paper.

Tanja Major became fascinated in the versatile organisms through her work as a food photographer. Mushrooms have an amazing diversity in both their appearance and composition, and different cultures over the centuries have used both edible and poisonous mushrooms for traditional religious and medicinal purposes. For example, the discovery of birch polypore in the equipment of the famous glacier mummy Ötzi—found in 1991 in the Italian part of the Ötztal Alps—suggests that mushroom species with medicinal benefits were already known in the Copper Age.

Tanja Major is not only interested in the traditional uses of mushrooms, but in their material potential. Since 2020, she has been experimenting with the fruiting bodies of various fungi species and has gradually created her so-called “Mykobüttenpapier.” Myko comes from the Greek mýkēs (μύκης) for mushroom and Büttenpapier is a German word for handmade paper.

Making paper from mushrooms is not entirely new. In the 1970s, Miriam C. Rice began her intensive study of natural dyes, which led her to explore the potential of mushrooms in arts and crafts at the Mendocino Art Center in California. With the help of Dorothy Beebee, they published their results in 1974. After extracting pigments and dyes from mushrooms for textiles, Rice used the mushroom pulp remaining after dye extraction as a base material for papermaking. Along with other artists she developed the mushroom-pulp paper further and presented it in several exhibitions. More recently the biologist Dr. Rita Lüder has been teaching the production of mushroom paper since 2012 as part of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Mykologie (German Society of Mycology) Mushroom Coach training. Through the training, Tanja Major encountered paper made from mushrooms for the first time.

In 2017 Major made her first mushroom paper from birch polypore, a suitable species for papermaking. However, in her opinion, the quality of the resulting paper was inferior to most handmade paper. To improve on the quality, Major refined her own scooping technique in a washi papermaking workshop. In forays through the woods, she purposefully collected different types of mushrooms for both paper pulp and pigments for dyeing paper or textiles. Curiosity and fascination drove the artist further, leading to experimentation in mixing different ratios of varying fungi species. She succeeded in tailoring her formulas for specific properties and significantly improved the paper quality. Major describes the difference between her handmade mushroom paper and those made during the Mushroom Coach training as follows: “These papers are small in size, usually in a brownish hue. The feel of the “Mykobüttenpapier” is of a fine, delicate, white texture, sometimes gauzy like a silk fabric.”

Since then Major has developed mushroom papers with a range of textures, haptics, and capabilities. She can produce creamy, velvety, and padded surfaces, or rough and brittle ones. The paper can be used for writing or sophisticated folding techniques. She has also been able to produce parchment-like and transparent papers. The stability of some mushroom paper even allows formats of up to one meter by one meter fifty (39.37 x 59.06 inches) with very little raw material input. She plans to determine the paper’s durability and color stability through long-term observation.

Tanja Major’s work seems to offer promising solutions to the increasingly pressing needs for resource-saving and ecological paper production. To produce pulp from fungi, no chemicals are needed. The material does not even need to be cooked, as the artist revealed, but can be processed by merely pureeing the fresh mushroom bodies with water. Thus, no energy-intensive pre-processing is necessary and there is no water contamination. Mushrooms, unlike trees, are also a fast-growing raw material with great potential for low-impact cultivation. Certain species of fungi are “decomposers” and break down waste plant and animal matter for nourishment. Finally, mushroom paper is completely compostable—a piece of nature that can become nature again.

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NOTES

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Albert Zink, Marco Samadelli, Paul Gostner, & Dario Piombino-Mascali, “Possible evidence for care and treatment in the Tyrolean Iceman,” International Journal of Paleopathology, vol. 25 (June 2019): 110–117.

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Dorothy Beebee: “Remembering Miriam Rice,” www.cnch.org/cnchnet/spring-2011/remembering-miriam-rice/ (accessed January 23, 2023).

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Miriam C. Rice, “Mushrooms for Color” (1988) and “Mushrooms for Paper” (1993), YouTube videos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK_XXAY-0xQ (accessed January 23, 2023).

Tanja Major, interview with the author, February 1, 2023.

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