The desire to shape the natural world has brought increasingly chaotic results. Plants and fungi offer an ancient perspective about collaboration and flexibility. In the Hollow Bones series, I combine flora and mushroom spores with imagery from John Audubon’s Birds of America: Fifty selections with commentaries by Roger Tory Peterson. At first, it felt strange to alter, to disturb, Audubon’s iconic birds. The Passenger Pigeon was my first. Extinct since 1914, it was once the most abundant bird in North America, believed to be numbering around 3 billion. It was a harbinger of the current disturbing reduction of birds, called a “loss of nature” by biologist Kevin Gaston.

Here’s what I did: I covered Audubon’s Passenger Pigeon in black gesso, painting everything but the two joined birds. Once dry, I placed pressed plants on the painted paper, and on top of the plants, I placed foraged mushrooms with their gill-side down. After many hours, the mushrooms released some of the millions of spores contained in their gills; the powdery spores fell and marked the paper with their color and texture. With the marks of mushrooms and plant silhouettes, and separate from their original habitat, the birds emerge transformed. The imagery of each piece is changed, while Roger Tory Peterson’s commentary on the other side remains intact.