About 10 years ago, I watched a TED Talk by Paul Stamets about mushrooms… and something in my brain permanently rewired itself. I went from thinking mushrooms were weird and gross to dedicating my entire life to them. I joke that the fungi inoculated my mind... and at this point, I’m not fully convinced they *didn’t*.

What I love about mycology is that it has endless rabbit holes to explore. There’s cultivation, foraging, photography, DNA barcoding, microscopy, fabric dyes, ecology, discovering potentially undocumented species… the deeper you go, the weirder and more magical it becomes. As a lifelong “jack of all trades,” I wanted to try *all* of it.

At first, I dreamed of running a mushroom farm and growing rare species. I even ran a successful Cordyceps farm for a while. But eventually I realized commercial cultivation involved a lot more scrubbing, sterilizing, and hauling substrate than my romantic mushroom-farmer fantasy had imagined. Somewhere between cleaning tubs and staring at fungi for unhealthy amounts of time, I discovered my real obsession: macro photography.

Macro photography completely changed the way I see the world.

I love that it reveals tiny hidden universes that most people walk past every single day without noticing. Slime molds become alien sculptures. Tiny fungi look like enchanted forests. Rotting logs transform into entire ecosystems filled with microscopic life. Sometimes I’ll sit beside one fallen log for hours because every few inches reveals another bizarre little world.

Maybe part of why I love macro so much is because I’m short and it finally lets me feel tall ;)

But genuinely, I think one of the meanings of life is to remain amazed. To notice things. To stay curious. To look closer. There is an unbelievable amount of beauty hiding in places most people never think to look.

That’s why I started Pink Spore.

I wanted to share this hidden world with other people through art, photography, science, and storytelling. It honestly means so much to me that someone would choose to hang my work on their wall or wear something inspired by fungi.

I also want to combine macro photography with fashion because clothing is such a powerful form of communication. Whenever I wear mushroom clothing, strangers suddenly start telling me about mushrooms they found, trips they took, weird fungi they saw growing in their yard, or experiences they’ve had in nature. It creates conversations. It changes how people notice the world around them.

So naturally… I want mushroom everything.

Mushroom shirts. Mushroom pants. Mushroom hats. Mushroom socks. Tiny fungi invading every possible corner of reality.

Thank you so much for being here and supporting my strange little spore-filled journey. It truly means the world to me.

I love you.