Alternately beautiful and disgusting but nearly always fascinating, works of art that use nature in place of more traditional media raise questions about the power and responsibility of human dominance over our natural surroundings and the other species living on Earth. These living, breathing works of art might be innocently pretty, like modified flower petals or arrangements of colorful mushrooms, or they might feel a little more sinister, making controversial use of living mice, insects or bacteria swabbed from human orifices.

What’s your take on the use of living things as art? Do you believe the message justifies its potential death, even if it’s a bonsai tree or an ant?

Philodendron Xanad by Ruben Bellinkx

The lush green leaves of a living philodendron plant seem to have pierced right through a wall in a confounding installation by Belgium-based artist Ruben Bellinkx. The leaves, as you can see, are much too large and seemingly undamaged to have been forced through small holes in the walls – so how’d he do it? Quite simply, the artist rebuilt that section of the wall from scratch, cutting careful slits following the contours of the leaves with a jigsaw.

Jeweled Larval Cocoons by Hubert Duprat

When placed in an aquarium with nothing but gold, turquoise and pearls to make their cocoons from, caddisfly larvae will build themselves jeweled enclosures that end up looking like tiny sculptural treasures when they’re done. Artist Hubert Duprat ‘collaborated’ with the Trichopteres larva to produce the final results, which are held together with silk excreted from their salivary glands. The larvae spend a few weeks inside these jeweled cocoons before emerging as mature flies.

The Life and Death of Botanicals: 6 Works by Azuma Makoto

Artist Azuma Makoto is known for incorporating live and cut flowers, vines, bonsai trees and even full-scale palm trees into his botanical works of art, often contrasting themes of vitality and decay. For an exhibit entitled ‘Drop Time’ at the Mass Gallery in Tokyo, Makoto created beautiful bouquets and placed them inside acrylic boxes so their slow decay could be observed through all its stages. Another floral exhibit, ‘Iced Flowers,’ temporarily preserved bouquets inside blocks of ice.

For ‘Sephirothic Flower,’ Makoto took lush floral arrangements deep beneath the surface of the sea and photographed them in the dark waters, capturing their interactions with sea creatures like eels.

Makoto has even launched plants into space. ‘EXOBIOTANICA 2’ saw bouquets lifted beyond the Earth’s atmosphere using weather balloons, and the original EXOBIOTANICA did the same with a Japanese white pine bonsai inside a carbon fiber frame.

Somehow, the artist’s installation of a living bonsai inside an abandoned power plant feels just as momentous as those outer space shots, embodying a hopeful message about life springing eternal.

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Art That Breathes 17 Living Creations Made Of Plants Fungus Bacteria

Concrete problems tend to start small, with micro-cracks expanding and exposing rebar to corrosive water, oxygen, carbon dioxide and chlorides that compromise structural integrity — but what if those cracks could be caught early, before they spread, then filled automatically by a dormant fungus?

Congrui Jin has been working the problem for years, and recently published “Interactions of fungi with concrete: significant importance for bio-based self-healing concrete” in the academic journal Construction & Building Materials.

“This idea was originally inspired by the miraculous ability of the human body to heal itself of cuts, bruises and broken bones,” said Jin of her work. “For the damaged skins and tissues, the host will take in nutrients that can produce new substitutes to heal the damaged parts.”

Like an immune system, the idea here is to put the ingredients in place throughout a structure, by adding fungi and nutrients to concrete as it is mixed. And Jin’s research represents the “first application of fungi for self-healing concrete, a low-cost, pollution-free and sustainable approach.”

She and her colleagues have experimented and found Trichoderma reesei to have the right combination of properties for their purposes. From there, “the fungal spores, together with nutrients, will be placed into the concrete matrix during the mixing process,” explains Jin.

“When cracking occurs, water and oxygen will find their way in. With enough water and oxygen, the dormant fungal spores will germinate, grow and precipitate calcium carbonate to heal the cracks.” Then, when the cracks are filled, the fungi form new spores that lie in wait for future issues to arise.

This isn’t just about fixing buildings, streets and bridges, though many of these are suffering from lower public works budgets  — critical infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, also use concrete as part of their radiation shielding.

Jin and her colleagues still face challenges in adapting the fungi to be sufficiently robust and enduring in various climates and with differing nutrient availability, but are making progress toward an eventual commercially available solution. Meanwhile, other parallel strategies are also being explored, including the use of sunlight and algae to create self-healing cement.

Breaking down one of the most difficult types of trash, this incredible working incubator turns sterilized plastic remnants into nutritional biomass humans can consume and digest, in short: food. Texture, taste and flavor depend upon the strain of fungus, but reportedly can be quite strong as well as quite sweet.

Livin Studio, an Austrian design group known for innovative work on insect farms, has built a working model of this growth sphere (dubbed the Fungi Mutarium) that takes parts of mushrooms usually left uneaten and grows them into fresh snacks.

From the creators: “We were working with fungi named Schizophyllum Commune and Pleurotus Ostreatus. They are found throughout the world and can be seen on a wide range of timbers and many other plant-based substrates virtually anywhere in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia. Next to the property of digesting toxic waste materials, they are also commonly eaten. As the fungi break down the plastic ingredients and don’t store them, like they do with metals, they are edible.”

In terms of the process, “Fungi Mutarium is a prototype that grows edible fungal biomass, mainly the mycelium, as a novel food product. Fungi is cultivated on specifically designed agar shapes that the designers called FU.  Agar is a seaweed based gelatin substitute and acts, mixed with starch and sugar, as a nutrient base for the fungi. The FUs are filled with plastics. The fungi is then inserted, it digests the plastic and overgrows the whole substrate. The shape of the FU is designed so that it holds the plastic and to offer the fungi a lot of surface to grow on. “

For now, the digestion is a relatively slow process, taking up to a few months for a set of cultures to fully mature, but by the standards of plastic biodegrading in nature this is still an extraordinary feat. The team continues to work with university researchers to make the process faster and more efficient. “Scientific research has shown that fungi can degrade toxic and persistent waste materials such as plastics, converting them into edible fungal biomass.”

This novel application comes just a few years after a group of Yale students discovered a species of fungi on a trip to Ecuador as part of a Rainforest Expedition and Labratory led by a molecular biochemist (with findings subsequently published in the Journal of Applied and Environmental Biology). Even in the absence of light and air, the species they examined thrived in landfill environments, suggesting potential near-future and larger-scale solution for existing waste sites as well.