Petrichor and Pigments with Sarah Minarik
Sarah Minarik sits on the bench at the trailhead, sporting a hand-felted hat, made and dyed with mushrooms. Yes, reader. Mushrooms. Welcome to the rest of your life. A wicker basket rests under her elbow nook, her rain jacket nestled within it, in preparation for potential precipitation. She’s got a warm smile and a sort of patience that seems to come from steady hours spent on trails in search of materials for her artwork. It’s my first ever mushroom forage, and I’m trying my hardest to play human sponge, absorbing and morphing my behavior to match hers for best results. I try to suppress my giddiness (hello, I’m an adult) on our search for Omphalotus olivascens, a golden-orange variety also known as the Jack-o-Lantern mushroom, that miraculously transforms into a buttery-soft, olive-sage green that Sarah creates in large, steaming vats to dye fabric. She shows me where our pumpkin-colored pal has made its green metamorphosis mark on her felted hat. My eyebrows do gymnastics on my face while my mouth drops open in a whispered “what” formation. I study her hat in awe–although I’ve attended one of her mushroom dying workshops, knowing the orange-to-green transformation is like watching a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis. Their color-changing wizardry doesn’t just happen from orange to green–their gills are also bioluminescent, glowing alien-lime green at night. Call me a human Birkenstock, but that shit is wild.
We hit the meditative rhythm of the trail. The path guides us to a sturdy family of gnarled oak trees, and we listen to the birdsong cutting through the branches. As we make our way, we weave from conversation to natural noticings, and it makes for easy talk. Stay away from poison oak, Sarah’s allergic. Cut-down tree trunks are little mushroom abodes, keep an eye out for those. A forage is slow, deliberate. “It’s like a land snorkel,” I eloquently articulate. Ah yes, the mind of a fresh college graduate, I think to myself. But that’s who Sarah seems to be, someone to whom you can say juvenile things and then add her own flavors to the cocktail of enthusiasm for the great outdoors.
As the daughter of a “run bum” of a father according to her mother, Sarah was no stranger to exploring the foggy, lush hills of Northern California. Her father lived to run, and had his eyes set on qualifying for the Olympics. When Sarah was born and her father's dreams took on new forms, they landed on competitive orienteering, which is a sport that requires finding checkpoints in nature with the help of a map and compass. This was something that Sarah and her father could do together, while still quenching his thirst for physical challenge and exploration. She quickly became an expert navigator, and developed a keen sense of safety and security in unknown places. She is still fascinated by maps, and often traces topography as a form of meditation. On the other hand, her mother provided a sturdy foundation for Sarah’s creative pursuits, and complimented her father’s outdoor contributions with a steady supply of knowledge about mending and altering clothes to last forever. She held down the backbone of Sarah’s experimentations, making sure she had ample room to play with new materials, ultimately inspiring her to pursue costume design in college.
As life went on and Minarik navigated the working world, she always felt a magnetic pull toward creating things. Although she excelled at her meaningful nonprofit work in music education and Fair Trade, she still had a burning desire to create. She found herself taking on responsibilities that involved building and making things; oftentimes straying away from her assigned tasks. Then, motherhood arrived, and shuffled her priorities into alignment as free time became scarce with new responsibilities. After performing the most creative act known to humankind, the world was brimming with a newfound sense of possibility. She signed up for graphic design classes at San Diego City College, and welcomed a new path toward sharing the stories that the natural world tells.
We let in the occasional interruption of potential nuggets. All of the sudden, alas! We find a bunch of what we’re looking for. Sarah isn’t a mycologist, but she’s learned from experience where these guys often live. We find a mother load on a live tree whose bark is separated from its trunk and has left a little nook for growth. Sarah walks me through her little ritual: she quietly rests her hand on top of the mushroom, taking a moment to thank it for its life, before carefully removing it from its place and filling in the cavity with dead leaves and dirt. These tactile moments of pause aren’t far from prayer; like thanking a divine source for a meal before consuming, Sarah deepens her connection with the magic from which her work derives itself. In a world where supply chains are compartmentalized and often hidden from the other links in the chain, Sarah takes the time to illuminate the vital roles each source plays in her finished pieces. The magic of this intentionality revitalizes these lost connections, leaving us with a vibrant story, wanting to learn more about the creative potential of the natural world.
Today, her design style remains true to a spirit that defines ecology and design as parts of the same whole, ingredients that blend into something greater than the sum of its components. Her work ropes us into wonderful conversations about these components, whether they are Omphalotus olivascens, their glowing nature, the forage adventure that it involves, the meditative rhythm of the trail. She only sells her work occasionally to ensure that each piece is incentivized by this vital spirit rather than quantity and numbers. She finds that her creativity remains bright when she narrows the scope of her production, and has found great joy in leading workshops that unveil the curtain behind her process.
Sarah describes her creative practice as something that really shuffled itself into alignment as her first son Forrest came into the picture. She mentions that her practice has filled in the cracks of her waking hours, kind of like how Omphalotus olivascens emerges in the crevasse between a dead tree trunk and its falling away bark. She tells me that she has dreams of building out a bigger studio space for her mushroom dying, and I love the idea. It’s important to nurture and protect the crevasses in our days and fill them with what makes us whole.
“The petrichor is strong,” Sarah notices as we reach the end of our forage. I ask her what petrichor is, and she tells me that it is defined loosely as the scents and oils from the surrounding plants that you notice after it rains. The phrase was coined by two Australian researchers in a 1964 Nature article after they found that dry earth had steam-distilled plant oils secreted by neighboring plants. Raindrops land on dry rocks and soil, “throwing aerosols of scent” into the air. Some research suggests that petrichor may be part of the reason why many cultures enjoy the rain. Now, I cherish its rarity in a usually dry Southern California desert. The hills are green now, reminding us both of our Northern California roots.
I’m grateful for the petrichor; our noses remind us of all the wild herbs and flowers that our eyes often glaze over on a rushed trail run or hike. Here, we’ve reached our forage’s end, properly soaked, a basket full of mostly litter and a few mushroom treasures. These are the results of slow noticing, we’re reaping the small but significant rewards. Foraging, like the petrichor, has brought us intimately close to the colors, flavors, and textures that will inform the way we move in the world, maybe now just a bit more deliberately, with intention.
You can follow Sarah on Instagram: @petrichor.pigments to continue admiring her experimentations with newfound colors and textures.
