Slow Growing in the Time of Trees: A Tree and Mushroom Walk
Fee: FREE
Registration: Advanced registration required; register here.
Lynden land manager Robert Kaleta, artist-in-residence Yevgeniya Kaganovich, and her collaborators in mycollective (James Charles, Lane Hall, Lisa Moline), lead a walk that explores the symbiotic relationship between trees and mushrooms. In 2019, Kaganovich planted trees on the grounds for her tree intuits chair residency project. They have continued to grow in and out of the shape of chairs ever since. Slow Growing in the Time of Trees considers and contextualizes the time and materiality of the trees themselves, as well as the trees in relation to the human and non-human species that come into contact and engage in transformations with them. It focuses on the aesthetic possibilities of intermixing human and nonhuman processes in complex webs of entanglement inherent in durational processes. Throughout the growing season, Kaganovich and her mycollective collaborators create speculative forms out of trimmed branches, willow, birch bark and cardboard, inoculate grain and straw medium with three varieties of oyster mushroom spores, and situate the forms in and around the trees on the grounds of Lynden Sculpture Garden, documenting the ways in which these cultivated fruiting bodies develop and distort fabricated forms.
For the walk, Kaleta will tell the story of Lynden’s trees, discuss the physiological changes that trees go through each season, and explain how each species fits into the urban forest ecosystem. mycollective will identify naturally occurring mushroom species and highlight some of the growing sculptures in tree intuits chair.
For more information about mycollective’s spring 2026 exhibition at Lynden, Slow Growing in the Time of Trees, click here.
About the Participants
Robert Kaleta, Lynden’s land manager, has worked for more than a decade in the field of ecological restoration, and has spent almost a lifetime enjoying what nature has to offer.
mycollective is a mycology-focused artist collective that brings together four creative practitioners and mushroom enthusiasts: Jim Charles, Lane Hall, Yevgeniya Kaganovich, and Lisa Moline. Kaganovich is currently in her second artist residency at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, where she is working on Tree Intuit Chair, a portion of her divergent fates project. She has a longstanding working relationship with Lynden, which was home to grow, a previous durational project. Kaganovich, Charles, Hall, and Moline were colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for many years, and began working together as mycollective, experimenting with myceliated sculptures, more recently. Kaganovich was a 2025-2026 C21 (UWM College of Letters & Sciences Center for 21st Century Studies) Fellow, and mycollective began their work at Lynden as part of a 2024-2025 C21 Collaboratory that included Kate Beutner. Hall and Moline have been pursuing creative research as the collaborative team badscience for over 25 years. They are also the co-founders of the Overpass Light Brigade.
