A flooded living room is a bad situation. But Marilla Palmer made the best of hers. In fact, she made a career of it.
Years of dampness in her Brooklyn home introduced Marilla to the moldy world of spores and fungi. They now are central to her collages and sculptures.
“Spores are beautiful. But there’s also the symbolism of decay and rebirth. And some are hallucinogens…there’s a lot of symbolism,” she said at Morristown’s Gallery Egan. Her show, “Debauchee of Dew in a Concrete Landscape,” runs all month.
The title refers to an Emily Dickinson poem from Marilla’s school days. Feminine references abound in her pieces, from embroidery to decoupage to jewelry. She migrated to sculpture and collage after studying painting at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.
“I had been doing all painting, and I became increasingly uncomfortable with all the baggage of men in the history of painting,” Marilla said. “No matter how you cut it, it’s the history of what men did.”
She has nothing against men per se. She is married to Peter Zaremba, lead singer of The Fleshtones rock band, and they have a guitar-shredding 13-year-old son.
It’s just that, well, spores are virgin territory, artistically speaking.
The discovery was serendipitous.
“Our house kept flooding,” Marilla said. “There were spores everywhere. Mushrooms were sprouting all over the place. I started picking them up and making mold spores out of them.”
She describes a collage titled “Sun Spore Flower” as a “spore print,” incorporating pressed sunflower petals and thread. It’s priced at $2,600, near the upper end of the show catalog. A hanging sculpture titled “Decadent Decay Fungus Chandelier” includes–you guessed it–tree fungi.
Marilla says her spores are specially treated and won’t trigger allergies or illness. Her only occupational hazard involved potent orange spores that reminded her of Cheez Doodles.
“I was tripping,” she said. “I don’t use them anymore.”
Gallery Egan’s reception for the official opening of the show is at 7 p.m. on Friday.
