MUSHROOMS AS MUSE
Shroom Rave's food artist Heidi Rushforth on mushroom ice, sober cults, and playing your food
What is a rave?
What constitutes “healing”?
How do we create sustainable models for social gathering beyond the alcohol-centric capitalist system?
On Sunday, October 22, I am teaming up with DoubleBlind to create a party-portal that attempts to answer—and embody—these questions.
This latest evolution of my psychedelic social experiment called “Shroom Rave” is a spa-themed rejuvenation rager called R&R, and—*extremely Stefon voice*—it’s got EVERYTHING: a psychoactive bar giving away plant-based psychedelics, an Iranian whirling dervish meditation, a cannabis ceremony, an integration space with seasoned underground psychedelic guides, a Taiwanese tea ceremony, bodyworkers giving exquisite massages, some of the world’s sickest DJs (and a live saxophonist), and perhaps most intriguingly… a mushroom ice sculpture / performance art / sound installation.
OK, I know that last string of words could mean literally anything. Which is why I decided to sit down with Heidi Rushforth, the food artist and professional chef behind this artwork, to give her a chance to explain why… there are ice cubes… filled with mushrooms… dripping from the ceiling.
I first met Heidi at a garden exhibition hosted by the artist David Horvitz. I had pulled up with Mikaela de la Myco, a mushroom educator whose work around psychedelics and motherhood was a key inspiration for my last Shroom Rave called Mushwomb. Following the rich aromatic trail of burning charcoal, salt, and earth, I discovered Heidi sitting in the dirt, grilling skewers of mushroom and fennel flowers on a smoking cinderblock. Using contact mics placed around the flames, she was also amplifying the sizzling, popping, and squealing sounds of the mushrooms as they turned into charred flesh. Mikaela and I spent most of the afternoon in the grass next to Heidi, and I’ve been obsessed with her work ever since.
Below, Heidi tells me more about her mushroom journey—starting with a trip that helped break her out of familial trauma around addiction, and ending with her current practice as the type of guerilla conceptual artist who creates ice sculptures out of mushrooms at a rave. (Shoutout the organic farm Smallhold for providing some of the most insanely delicious mushrooms for this edible experience!)
Hey Heidi! Let’s start with how you got into shrooms.
Heidi Rushforth: I grew up on a dairy farm in Olympia, Washington where a lot of mushrooms like chanterelles would grow in the fields. When I was 21, my brother showed me magic mushrooms, and they kind of saved my life. I experienced a lot of depression, and actually ended up in a hospital because I tried to commit suicide. Then I started therapy and took mushrooms and experienced a lot of healing in a very profound initial trip. And since then I’ve been more than a fan of mushrooms—I just believe in their power for therapy, for recreation, for connection, all of it.
Wow. Thank you for sharing that. May I ask what did the mushrooms bring up, or even say to you, on that initial transformative trip?
The religion I had been taught when I was younger was very severe and strict. My dad was actually a heroin addict, and then joined a cult called Synanon. This is crazy, I know… it's a long story. But the cult was started as a way for addicts to get clean. And then it became very destructive. My dad had beautiful Afro hair, and they shaved it on stage one time when he relapsed on heroin. They called it attack therapy, where they would demean and ridicule you. Just weird shit.
Anyway, as my dad was coming out of heroin addiction, he found Christianity. And that's what I learned growing up. Then, when I had that mushroom trip, I realized that I could let go of this idea of God that was so restricting and scary. Like, you can't do drugs, or you're gonna fucking go to hell, and all of this stuff that my dad taught me because of his past and his trauma. With the mushrooms, I saw the grid. I saw the connection of all living things in symbolic logic, and I understood that I was safe in that. It was like having the blinders open. You know?
That’s so beautiful I want to cry. So how did your relationship to mushrooms continue to evolve, especially as you started to find your calling as a chef and artist?
It’s been 20 years since that trip, and I’m finally at this point in my life where I'm integrating the lessons I've learned. It's like I'm trying to create an experience for someone where they're on a mushroom trip. To be so fully present, and feeling and touching and tasting—it’s like we're transcending, right? It’s both that paradox of being transcended to another space out of this dimension, yet still fully here. That’s what mushrooms do, and that’s what I want to do.
When you think about how the mushroom itself is so grounded in the earth, and yet reaching towards the sky, it contains both subterranean depths and elemental airiness at the same time. I love this duality about mushrooms. So should we talk about the performance that you'll be doing?
To your point, in Western culture, the sense of sight is king, right? But there is so much nuanced beauty and power of the softer senses like, taste, smell, touch. I like to play with ice because it is a very somatic thing. Touching ice brings you into your body very immediately. So [for the Shroom Rave Spa], I'm freezing a cluster of mushrooms into a big ball of ice that will hang from the rafter, then drip into a metal bowl. There's contact mics on the metal bowl, which will amplify the sound of the dripping water. As it melts, you'll see the mushrooms coming out of it.
It’s going to be so interesting to have this installation in the same room as the tea ceremony. Water as ice or hot tea, dripping from the ceiling and pouring into cups—it will fit perfectly into this concept of duality that we’re playing with at the party. There will be a daylight-filled, yin-focused, introspective ritual rooms upstairs, and a dark mushroom grotto for cathartic dancing downstairs. It’s just so cool when mushrooms are the muse. I’ve also never met someone who’s working at the intersection of art, music, and food quite like you. How did that practice evolve?
I wouldn't be here if I hadn't gotten laid off from restaurant work. Before COVID, I was working in restaurants and it was like being in the the fucking military. I was working in really hard kitchens—ones where you were scared. Then, when I was on unemployment, I started getting back to my roots and incorporating art into my food practice. But the art world is really hard to break into as an outsider. I was stuck on wanting to show my work in a gallery for a while. Then I realized I’m more of a guerilla artist. Institutional spaces aren’t me.
My friend David Horvitz is a conceptual artist with a garden-gallery space. And he said, “Come and do something in the garden.” So I made food for one of his openings, and I did this mussel burn where I foraged pine needles and smoked them outside, and people stood around this fire. It was very ritualistic. Someone even told me that the stuff I'm doing is very Fluxus.
I can totally see that! So what do you ultimately hope that people who come to R&R and experience your art might walk away from this experience with?
Mushrooms provide a really incredible source of nourishment. I just want to help people get back into their bodies, and to truly feel good.