Lichens
2023-
collaged old magazines / mosaic from salvaged ceramic tiles
The series Lichens (2023-) began during a period of enforced stillness, when neighbours and strangers were passing unwanted magazines through doorways and over online marketplaces. In a meditative process of tearing and layering, these loud, spent images — the visual noise of consumer culture — were transformed into depictions of lichen species: one of the oldest and most resilient life forms on earth.
The lichen is not a single organism. It is a community — fungus and algae living in close symbiosis, each dependent on the other, together more durable than either could be alone. The fungus offers structure and protection; the algae produce energy through photosynthesis. What appears as one thing is always a collaboration.
The collages mirror this logic materially. Built through obsessive layering — many strata pressed together, barely visible to the eye but felt under the fingers — they enact the kind of work that care so often involves: repeated, patient, accumulative. Something quiet and organic emerges from something discarded and loud.
The series has evolved across forms: from intimate paper collages into large-scale mosaic works made from broken and recomposed ceramic tiles. Across both, the question remains the same — what does it mean to learn from non-human life? From its patience, its interdependence, its capacity to grow on bare stone and endure for centuries?
In a culture that renders care invisible, the lichen makes mutual dependence legible — not as weakness, but as the very condition of survival.
Photo: Fotografie Ebinger