Description
“Mushrooms are the outcasts of the natural world. Inherently, they are punk.”
—Isabella Lalonde
Nautilus and designer Isabella Lalonde (founder of the New York-based label Beepy Bella) teamed up to create Mushroom Punks, a zine and field guide dedicated to a shared appreciation for mycology and born out of a foraging expedition in the Angeles National Forest.
In late November 2023, the team from Beepy Bella paired up with fungi expert Bat Vardeh to hunt for mushrooms in the mountains of southern California. Inspired by mushroom hunting field guides of the past, Mushroom Punks chronicles the outing in detail, weaving together photos taken by Lalonde and her assistant Olivia Kormushoff with an illustrated catalog of what mushrooms were discovered along the way—all enriched by Vardeh’s expert commentary.
The zine includes a cover illustrated by Lalonde, as well as a personal essay illustrating her longtime love of mushrooms and the impact they have had on her art. Check out our story on the project here.
Mushroom punks, rejoice.
About the collaborators:
Isabella Lalonde is a multidisciplinary artist and designer, who explores the natural world through her eponymous brand Beepy Bella. Having fallen in love with mushrooms at 6 years old, she writes of them, “they stand isolated, unexplored, and are completely mesmerizing to people who understand their uniqueness.” Lalonde also designed a mushroom-inspired ring—available exclusively on beepybella.world—as a wearable accompaniment to the Mushroom Punks zine.
Bat Vardeh is a mushroom expert who leads foraging expeditions through the Los Angeles Mycological Society, as well as through the group Women Forage SoCal, of which she is the founder and president. Vardeh also works for the Fungal Diversity Survey, helping to catalog and identify interesting fungi through DNA sequencing.