Mykobütten: The Mushroom Papers of Tanja Major
In a world tipping toward artificiality, Tanja Major’s Mykobütten offers a tender recalibration. Her handmade papers, woven not from pulp or rags but from the filaments of fungi, are less an object and more an offering. A soft, spore-kissed whisper from the forest floor.
Aromatic 'Sponge Mushrooms'
Handmade paper from fungus.
Crafted from nearly 100% fungus, these ethereal sheets are both material and message: compostable artworks that trace decay and renewal. They are perhaps what paper might look like if it had dreams - slightly surreal, delicately textured, and lit from within by mushroom pigments that shimmer like damp earth under moonlight.
Paper made with almost 100% mushrooms, returned to the forest for compostability tests. This example has been decomposing for 3 weeks.
The process itself is slow and deliberate, echoing the natural cycles it draws from. Fruiting bodies - the visible caps and stems of fungi - are foraged and broken down by hand, softened and worked into a fibrous pulp. This pulp is then hand-pulled using traditional paper-making techniques, forming sheets that retain the texture and memory of their organic origins. Natural mushroom pigments of ochres, indigos, and silvery greys are added to the mix or brushed across the surface, staining each piece with the colours of the forest. The resulting papers are dried, pressed, and left to breathe, retaining the wild energy of the materials from which they were made.
Nature Art Cube - MYCORRHIZA, 2021
Major, a food writer and award-winning photographer by trade, now turns her eye toward the underworld and the hidden, humming networks of mycelium that pulse beneath our feet. Her art is a meditation on fragility, not only of material but of life itself. In the ghost-paper she creates from mushroom fibre, the lines blur between organism and artefact, between nature’s script and human translation.
“My work,” she explains, “is about cycles - of life, of decomposition, of transformation.” Her mushroom papers, born of mycological study and artistic intuition, embody a new form of cooperation - a quiet, symbiotic act between human and fungus. To touch one is to enter a liminal zone: both paper and not-paper. It is a page that could write itself, where the sheets feel alive and not merely biodegradable, but biodegradable with intent - to return, to re-root, and to become again. The pigments extracted from fungi radiate subtle psychedelia in ochres, indigos, and spectral greys that seem to shift in the light like mushroom gills.
Handmade Mushroom Paper
Whether photographing wild edibles, foraging for dye-producing fungi, or crafting collages from Mykobütten and cyanotype, she builds bridges between eye and spore, pigment and page, self and soil. Each piece is a love letter to the invisible: the filament, the hyphae, the hum beneath the humus.
Nature, she reminds us, is not separate from us, but is the root language we have forgotten how to speak. With mushroom paper as her lexicon, Tanja Major begins to whisper it back.
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Lead Image: Wertpapiere - ©Tanja Major
All other images courtesy of Tanja Major.