Don't tell birds, but mushrooms are our favorite thing to learn about, and always have been. We love walking in forests with artists and mycologists and we love visiting labs to hear about the latest mushroom research.

We have had the pleasure of studying mushrooms with the following artists.

Click on images to see more about each artist.

Michelle Bunton, Teacher's Assistant
Ontario, Canada

Rooted in a space of paradox, my practice attempts to question the mnemonic capacity of technology as an archival medium, dismantling the notion of the video or sound record as an absolute or concrete preservation of the body/psyche. Creating multi-media, sculptural installations, my work aims to mirror a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another in a perseverance towards preservation. My practice is further influenced by a critical interest in neutrality, passivity and Quantum Theory’s concept of “potentia,” which is defined as an intermediary layer of reality that exists halfway between the physical reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the image. I consider technology-based archives to occupy this intermediate reality, offering a critical venue through which to examine larger themes, such as gender, sexuality, death and decay.

Ryan Parra, Mesa, Arizona

Our ancestors' knowledge and value of the environment's flora was vital. Everywhere, they were surrounded by potential balms, poultices, pain relievers, euphoriants, and entheogens, using these systems as tools for the sustenance of their bodies and edification of their spirits. Yet, where these ethnobotanical gardens once grew now stand pharmacies with suspiciously clean white walls and endless supplies of medicine. While advancements in pharmacology are indeed essential, at the same time it's unreasonable to not have a fundamental understanding of the plants from where they derived, along with the wisdom and value of the natural world left behind by our forebears.

Over the past ten years I've been working on a project titled Vivarium, consisting of still life photographs and digital composites of medicinal flora growing throughout the southwest and beyond. Through this ethnobotanical survey, as I create each constructed photograph with inserted symbols and metaphors highlighting each plant’s unique history not only is it my priority to document the flora with scientific precision for identification purposes, but I also have a curiosity for expanding the definition of the “still life pushing these techniques which emerged in the artist’s studio out into the plant’s environment. Furthermore, by accompanying each photograph with a description of the flora’s unique history, I also aspire to remind viewers of the magical, symbiotic role plants have played in our exploration of knowledge and well being for hundreds of thousands of years.

Further reflecting this interest in the curious intersection of culture and nature, the project title Vivarium (Latin for “place of life”) refers to an enclosed space with plants or animals for observation and research purposes. This subtle act of concealing fragments of the natural world expresses a sense of power one has over something much like science with nature, while also expressing great curiosity and love towards that same thing. From here, visual narratives of curiosity, containment, and control evolve as the conceptual framework that I explore throughout these photographs.

Hannah Bestly Burt, London, UK

Hannah’s practice is grounded in an urgent love for the overlooked natural world, the aesthetics of the imperfect and a belief in a political imperative to encourage joy in the world. A current project is a series of ‘mycelium fragment’ wall-hangings - sculptural wall-based objects composed of woven wool networks of Mycelium-like structures. To express these branching and fusing webs Hannah developed a method of hand-weaving 3D networks using purpose-built frame looms and ‘loose’ random warp combined with double or triple layers of weft. Through this work Hannah wants to elevate fungi - to argue for the uncanny beauty of this overlooked Kingdom. Hannah is fascinated by how mycelium complicates the idea and value of individuality and she is inspired by the hope that fungi have to offer as a remedy to human impact on the environment.

Another body of Hannah’s work is a collection of ‘Heraldic Banners for the Natural World.’ Hannah inverts the traditions and symbols of heraldry, creating quiet tapestries with standards of spore prints, burdock roots and tangled branches. These are objects of veneration, prioritizing the overlooked underland, but they are also objects of protest, a way of declaring dedication to the protection of the natural world.

Alec Chalmers, Leeds, UK

I am interested in the intersection of architecture, ecology and sustainability, and worldbuilding. I am interested in many different areas that might intersect with these subjects, such as using different aspects of biology to design new ways of building worlds. I approach my work from the perspective of a Concept Artist with an eye for exciting design, utilising the same skills and production workflows used in production in the game and film industries.

I have a BA (Hons) Visual Communication (Animation) from Birmingham City University and an MA in Concept Art for Games & Animation from Teesside University. I also have a Fellowship qualification with the Higher Education Academy, for teaching at the Higher Education level.

Josephine Rutherfoord, Bucks UK

My name is Josephine Rutherfoord and I am an artist whose curiosity about the world above me, below me and in me has led me to work in the space where art meets science. Collaboration with scientists is a core part of my practice. I use a variety of processes and media – drawing, cyanotypes, 3D printing, video and cast sculptures in latex and wax.  I have worked with a range of subjects from IVF and miscarriage to mycelium and fungi.

‘i grandi dolori sono muti’ (2006) was a work that came from my experience of having a miscarriage and was an installation of small sculptural forms made from latex and wax. The forms fitted in the palm of my hand and were voids, the latex ones filled with my breath to stop them from collapsing. The work expressed the loss and emptiness following a miscarriage.

My recent work, ‘AboveBelow’, (2021) shown at Ovada gallery in Oxford was inspired by ‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake and explored the amazing world of mycelium and fungi. ‘AboveBelow’ was a mixed media installation with large cyanotypes of the ways different mycelium grow to seek nutrients, a cluster of 3D printed fungi on soil and video. With this I aimed to bring the hidden world of mycelium out into the light for all to experience.

I am continuing to work with mycelium including growing it in substrate in moulds.

Ali Matthews

“I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.” - JOHN CAGE, 1954

I am an American artist living and working in the UK. I work across performance, music and video and have toured work to theatres, galleries and club spaces across the UK & Europe. The pandemic, in tandem with the climate crisis, has made us awake from our normal Anthropocene coma and come alive to the natural world and its many languages. While plants and animals usually get all the glory, fungi are the neglected third kingdom on earth. They share DNA with us and provide solutions to many 21st century ills - cleaning up oil spills, healing our brains from depression, providing protein alternatives and showing us how forests operate. They turn us on to the cycles of birth and decay occurring under our feet. Indeed, mushrooms mirror Anthropocene ruin back to us – they grow in ‘edge places’ and against all odds. This residency coincides with a period of artistic research leave for me focusing on creating a new show about fungi and interviewing mycologists, and as such it comes at a perfect time.

Maria L Schechter, Bloomington, Indiana

Maria Schechter was born and raised in Pasadena, California. She co-creates with the natural world using living materials, mycelium composites, and plant-based palettes. Her workshops call us to recognize that art and nature are inseparable, intertwined expressions of the beauty and wonder that we call the natural world. She was nominated for a MacArthur Award at the age of 21 for her development of What-is-Art-What-is-Sound, an international arts collective turned non-profit, founded in 13 countries and 28 cities with over 200 artists members. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has received a variety of grants and awards, including the UCLA Artist Achievement Award and the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, Los Angeles, CA. And this year she has been awarded A Dehaan Artist of Distinction Award from the DeHaan Foundation and Indiana Arts Council. Her first mycelium project, Gatekeepers, a homage to impermanence grown over a three year period, is now on the grounds at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, where the five foot arch will eventually decompose back into the earth. She has exhibited with several galleries and museums including Agora Gallery and Whitebox in New York City, The Abrams Claghorn Gallery, Anderson Museum, Minnetrista Museum and Gardens, Triton Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum. She has been published in Eluxe Magazine, The Ecological Citizen, Nature Evolve Magazine, and many others. Maria earned her bachelor of fine art from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA. She initiated graduate work with New York University and completed a master degree from Schiller International University in Heidelberg, Germany. Maria lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana. 

Val Smets, Brussels, Belgium

Val Smets’ practice is positioned between painting, installation, sculpture, and sensory intervention, often combining painting with light installation, site-specific settings, and smell. Her works reflect on the artist’s deep engagement with painting through a multitude of technics,
and her theoretical exploration of the position of humans towards non-human agency through the paradigm of mycelium and fungi.

Her simple treatment of the canvas and the absence of stretchers in her large-scale paintings highlight the materiality of the medium while underlining the artist’s engagement with the ongoing discourse on the traditional presentation of painting, further breaking the confines of the genre. Her direct application of paint on the canvas without preparatory sketches speaks to the remarkable confidence of Smets’ gesture, as her fluid lines and light brushstrokes form colorful landscapes of oversized mushrooms through seemingly abstracted forms.

By playing with scale and proportions Smets is repositioning the viewer as the smallest entity
of the scene, evoking questions of perspective as she morphs our familiar gaze on nature. The work allows the viewer to see the world through an ant’s perspective, highlighting one of the smallest (and biggest) groups within our planetary ecosystem: the mushroom.

Thinking through Merlin Sheldrake´s “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures” Smets celebrates the incredible diversity of a lifeform that can pop up overnight, lives inside all of us and, and balances the paradox of new life and decay. Through her visual language, Smets creates a psychedelic new interpretation of Alice

Mary Hegedus, Toronto, ON

I am a doctoral student at York University researching fungi, science, and visual culture. My interests centre around the knowledge we can gain from fungi. What can fungi teach us about film and media?

            For my master’s thesis at the University of Toronto I explored the parallels of the precarity and resilience of mushrooms and survivors in post-apocalyptic film. Fungi are the focus of my studies as I am interested in the fact that they represent things that exist in complex systems that humans don’t usually see.

            I am currently working on media representations of fungi and film specifically with respect to timelapse photography, Uexkull’s Umwelt theory and AI GAN modelling.

Phyllis Gordon, Scarborough, ON

My practice can be described as an observational engagement with the environment. Often my work begins outdoors, with taking time, being there, walking, drawing, and taking photographs. It then comes into the studio, where I draw, carve, collage, or work with pochoir or relief printmaking.

My reading of Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled LIfe (2021) last summer was the catalyst for my mycophilia. Sheldrake’s chapter on lichens sparked my desire to understand lichens more and think about their significance, and their implications for life on the planet and beyond. I am in awe of their collaboration and convergence, and that they are “a gateway to the idea of symbiosis”. Rather than being in competition and conflict, the fungi and algae (and also innumerable other species) “sing a metabolic “song” that neither can sing in isolation”.  Lichens exemplify a strategy of life that achieves fundamental collaboration, a metaphor for doing together what cannot be done in isolation.  

From my home studio I have started drawing lichens, exploring the steady and slow coverage lichens achieve.
I have also made some reduction prints, seeking to convey their strength, translucence, and quiet bearing.  I have used both lichens and photographs of them as source material. So far I have been working on handmade Japanese papers that offer a depth and colour that echoes the surfaces where lichen congregate. 

My next step is to spend time in Ontario habitats of commonly recognized lichen, being with and observing the lichen.  Following this, I will try to convey something about lichen and this experience in my work.  My intuition at this point is that very slow movement will be a part of what is to be conveyed, somehow. Given my age and my very slow recovery from Long Covid, such imagery may speak personally to me and provide comfort.

Katherine Young, Atlanta, Georgia
https://katherineyoung.info/

The expressive noises and curious timbres of my electroacoustic music circulate via kinetic structures, as I engage notated compositional, improvisational, electronic, and installation practices. I take a process-oriented approach that prioritizes symbiotic modes of musicmaking and collective listening. Relationship building and collaborative ethics are central to my practice. The human and more-than-human ecologies that initiate, sustain, and produce the work become significant compositional materials and musical considerations.

The LAPhil, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Dal Niente, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, and others have commissioned my music. My installation work has been commissioned by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. As a bassoonist and improviser, I amplify my instrument and employ a flexible electronics setup. I have documented my work on numerous recordings, including a duo with Anthony Braxton.

Recent significant collaborations include: Requiem: A White Wanderer (2019) created with Luftwerk using data gathered by glacioloist Douglas MacAyeal; BIOMES 4.0 (2021) created with Yarn/Wire and produced as a multi-part outdoor installation and performance piece at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, as well as the installation-performance piece boundarymind (2022) co-composed with Linda Jankowska and presented at 6018North in Chicago. I received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition to support my Mycorrhiza series for solo performers and electronics. I teach composition, improvisation, and electronic music at Emory University in Atlanta.

Katie St Clair, North Carolina

The natural world has always seemed to me extremely complex and impossible to truly comprehend. Lying on the forest floor, even the simplest forms and structures: a leaf, twig or mushroom is ripe with mystery. An alchemy is realized as the living world decays and transforms.  The layers of soil below us are in an earthly cosmic dance, one  where the whole composition is more important than any one functioning individual aspect.

 As an artist, I find myself in awe of the endless connections, the symbiotic and beneficial partnerships as well as the parasitic relationships, that are in constant flux. We are one organism in an impossibly complex web of being. My sight specific installations are spheres of made of locally collected refuse and natural pigment and ice. The spheres are hung above a canvas and melt. Eventually the water and pigment settle into large pools on the canvas that evaporate over time, leaving an inky crust of marks that result in a painting. 

 The installation exposes all the different stages of transformation in the painting process that viewers don’t normally see in a gallery. As opposed to my painting practice, the melting of the spheres is a natural act of painting without an artist’s hand. The normality of the roadside has been restructured to direct attention and heighten awareness to what is so commonly overlooked.

Melanie Fisher, Buffalo, New York

My sculptures are organic and otherworldly. With influences from nature and sci-fi, I build large forms that are new hybrids of species, with mixed characteristics from the plant and animal kingdom. By working in a range of scales and mediums, I explore the connections between our micro and macro worlds, imagining the opportunity to discover something previously unknown.

The details in my work focus on the relationship between interior and exterior space, drawing the viewer in for closer inspection. By leaving small anomalies in each piece, I invite the viewer to explore and discover something they’ve never seen. I am currently focusing on round, bulbous forms to reflect fertility, sometimes filling an interior space with hundreds of seeds.

T.S. Anna, Groningen, Netherlands

I and you are in a time where facts and opinions merge into new entities. Amidst a technologically charged present with wishful illusions of objectivity, fake news and deep fakes, I find myself - as many other contemporaries - in a joyfully desperate search for truth. Truth as something that is not known, something that happens rather than something to be found. This inquiry has an iterative nature and through it a growth of multiples takes place. Driven by a passion for the complexities of nature, my work seeks to invite the spectator to wander, discover and wonder.

Always and never the same to each other my works are the truth bearers, celebrating minuscule moments of change and paying tribute to chance having a chance. The works are rarely produced, rather growing over time. By doing so a truth continuously evolves. The series of sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and installations are witnesses to something that has happened, has been. An archive. Archiving is how I view my artistic endeavors, and each reveals one out of an set of multiplicities, a version in its own right. It is my greatest aspiration to engage you in a playful journey, to invite to wander and poke through the archives, to become part of it. I wish for you to take some seeds of my truth in your truth and to leave some of your truth to me in return.

Laura Erdman, Calgary, Alberta

I am a visual artist living in Calgary, Alberta. I have a diploma in Environmental Assessment & Restoration from Lethbridge Community College. I love nature. Ever since I was a little girl and my grandmother took me hunting for prairie crocus in the coulees of the Old Man River I have
known the natural world as a place of solace and a source of happiness. I studied fine art at the university in that same valley and felt the lines of nature thrumming through my drawings of the human form. I felt I could never do her justice in my artwork so I went to the college to study her science. Now much later in life I am seeing these two passions come together. I am excited by the possibilities of creating art that is beautiful, expressive, and soulful but that is also scientific, and rich with information. I experience art-making as a means of discovery. My
artwork has always been in service to nature, now I hope to enrich those expressions with a greater scientific spirit of curiosity and discovery.

Iris Kiewiet, Wakefiled, Qc

Iris Kiewiet, Dutch-Canadian artist, moved to Wakefield, Quebec from Rotterdam in 2006. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and in The Netherlands.

With a BFA in illustration from the Arts Academy Minerva in Groningen, she drew editorials in the Dutch national newspaper, and for many other publishers.

Her contemporary style in drawing and painting feature colour and natural patterns in combination with human elements. What connects someone deeply to life is a recurring theme in her work.

Kiewiet paints and draws from her studio at PAF-FAS in Farrellton. She has worked with many community groups and offers art classes.

Robyn Crouch, Montreal

The imagery and symbols that come through Robyn's work encourage one's gaze inward to the cellular realms. There, one discovers playful depictions of chemical processes; they are the basis for the macrocosm, and our human consciousness becomes an interface between the seen and the unseen worlds.

In her functional ceramic work, the influence of Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony encourages moments of contemplation. The viewer-participant can loose her or his train of thought while meandering through considerately composed collages of geometries, molecules, plants, and creatures, all woven together by strands of double-helical DNA. A flash of recognition. A momentary mirror.

A goal in this work is balance and harmony between the form, and the micro-mythologies encircling it. Moments of personal ritual in daily life beget even deeper, more conscious presence. Little by little over time we gain insight into what makes us tick.

Robyn’s goal is to provide a platform (however small), on which to rest, and off of which to launch forays into the luscious and potent realms of imagination, self-inquiry, and discovery during moments of solitude and engaged contemplation. So let us celebrate alone and together!

Emma Pallay, Montreal

I am a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in printmaking and drawing. My love of nature and non-human animals influences my artistic practice. As I create my imagery, I feel I am mimicking the process of caring for a seedling, allowing the idea to grow as I work and letting the process assume some of the artistic license. I gain inspiration through encounters with the natural world. The markings in tree bark and the resilience of plant growth, for example, fuel many of my ideas. I have a strong connection to nature and animals and the act of re-creating them in my artistic practice allows me to feel a stronger bond to them. Oftentimes my work only hints at things from the natural world while remaining abstract. I allow myself to create pieces that range from abstraction, to figurative, to realism.

Annie Thibault, Gatineu, Quebec

Inspired by an aesthetic in wich art, science, and nature overlap, her multi-disciplinary practice includes drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. By making use of the tools and technical resources of biological research laboratories and learning centres, she embraces organic matter itself as an artistic material, distilling it into a universe imbued with mystery. Her interest for the underground growth networks of mushrooms as interconnected ecological systems has led her to create works that in some ways question, both scientifically and artistically, the sensitivity of non-human life forms and the resilience of nature.

Suus Agnes Claessen, Holland

I am an author-illustrator and comics artist with a background in science communication, literary studies, and beekeeping. My work takes a particular interest in environmental ethics and the underdog. As a PhD candidate at the Centre for Sustainability, Otago University, New Zealand, I currently work on a graphic novel about human relationships with 'unloved' microcommunities of invertebrates, moss, and fungi. This is part of my interdisciplinary research that explores visual narrative as a method for cultivating attentiveness to nonhumans.

I look for ways to better coexist with my environments through different ways of knowing them —from folklore and myth to traditional and contemporary ecological knowledges— and let these stories colour my daily observations and actions, as I’m learning to read my surroundings intimately; perhaps even communicate with them. Who am I to them? Who responds to the seeds and spores I spread?

By engaging story and sense in processes of getting to know other beings, my creative practice seeks to bring them to wider cultural imaginations. It’s too easy to overlook or disregard them as backdrops to human life. By reviving forgotten wisdoms, I wish to contribute to a broader recognition of nonhumans in all shapes and sizes, not just for their importance and wondrousness, but also as life forms in their own rights, alive and aware, creatures full of story and for who things matter.

Lori Ono, Tokyo, Japan

Animals and plants get a lot of love. Fungi? Not so much. But yet mycology seems to be making its way into a larger cultural awareness. Fungi has a liminal quality of being subject, object and material. Fungus has been the subject of study in science and art.
Finding new ways to use fungus other than dyes and food products, artists and inventors are using mycelium for clothing, building, packaging and sculpture. The mycological renaissance has arrived.

We’re interconnected with fungus on a fundamental level. Examining these connections isa way to approach understanding the world. My work explores the shapes and forms ofmushrooms through photography and book arts. As I learn more about mycology, I create illustrated stories and zines to consolidate what I’ve learned and to share with others.

Mellissa Fisher, UK

I am a London based artist whose background stems from an interest in the interrelationships between fine art, illustration and science. My most recent works consist of a deep exploration of the connections between nature and the human body. I have been experimenting with using agar as a sculpting medium, producing bacterial portraits, which live and die, representing the ecosystem of the life cycle.

 I am currently studying a Masters Degree at Central Saint Martins, where I have just finished my first year. I have been exploring the wonders of nature and how growing cress seeds inside an agar sculpture can distort and reshape the original structure.

 I am keen to explore nature in more depth as I see my work heading that way in the future, my intention with the work is to engage with a wide audience, provoke thought, provoke emotion and discussion as well as enabling people to think about what is around them and what should be preserved for a better life. 

Katie St Clair, North Carolina

The natural world has always seemed to me extremely complex and impossible to truly comprehend. Lying on the forest floor, even the simplest forms and structures: a leaf, twig or mushroom is ripe with mystery. An alchemy is realized as the living world decays and transforms.  The layers of soil below us are in an earthly cosmic dance, one  where the whole composition is more important than any one functioning individual aspect.

 As an artist, I find myself in awe of the endless connections, the symbiotic and beneficial partnerships as well as the parasitic relationships, that are in constant flux. We are one organism in an impossibly complex web of being. My sight specific installations are spheres of made of locally collected refuse and natural pigment and ice. The spheres are hung above a canvas and melt. Eventually the water and pigment settle into large pools on the canvas that evaporate over time, leaving an inky crust of marks that result in a painting. 

 The installation exposes all the different stages of transformation in the painting process that viewers don’t normally see in a gallery. As opposed to my painting practice, the melting of the spheres is a natural act of painting without an artist’s hand. The normality of the roadside has been restructured to direct attention and heighten awareness to what is so commonly overlooked.

Alison Neville

Fungi, maps, and political events permeate most of my work. I find them to be bizarre and otherworldly. This being said I cannot understand enough about them. I wonder how they can be combined, what can be learned from them? Are there ways to bring out those things that intrigue me?

I examine world events and try to dissect them into understandable pieces. I try to play the scientist. The small and common button mushroom, available at every super-market, becomes the map for a nebula only seen through the eye of the Hubble Space telescope. I use maps to help me interpret political fragments into the cross-stitches that I can carry with me. Adding little indications of this research to make roads and public buildings. Cordyceps spring up in new varieties that choose kitsch statuettes as their hosts.

Jody Guralnick, Aspen, Colorado

I’ve named this body of work The Fifth Kingdom which is, in taxonomy, the kingdom of Fungi, the kingdom of the great hidden labyrinths of growth and decay that support all life.

This work functions at the intersection of the world we know, and what we can see if we look closer and closer still, the world of everyday reality, and the larger truths that govern life on this planet. I mingle such forms as rods, spheres, buds, blossoms and leaves that make up our earth, as well as roots and networks that link it all together. This is work that seeks to call attention to the detail; through an accretion of small marks I am replicating large systems and life forms.
I’ve observed lichen growing on rocks, slowly, slowly digesting the minerals from the rock and nutrients from the air and I’ve sought to replicate the universal order and form that that growth takes. I’m interested in the symbiosis of the forest, the connecting and dismantling that goes on in equal parts. I’m painting the patterning and root systems of these life forms.

 We can look at human vascular systems, or brain slices, or the view from an airplane window and see over and over again systems of networks working in partnership. We are attracted to these patterns because they are a part of us. I am painting a vision of pattern and connection.

2019

Field expeditions

Julie Ryder, Australia

I am a visual artist who works across the disciplines of textiles, drawing, digital printing, painting, glass and assemblage. Initially trained in science, I retrained as a textile designer in 1990, and over the past 25 years my arts practice has evolved in response to artistic opportunities and arts residencies, expanding my visual language by working with new media, new challenges and experiences. The materials I work with are an integral part of the message I want to convey, leading to a cross-disciplinary approach in making work for exhibition. I draw inspiration from the history of botany and botanical collectors; gender/social inequity; cross-cultural exchange, objects as receptacles of stories and memory; and the use of natural materials in making art in order to uncover hidden stories that lie between the pages of history. Cryptogams are a major co-collaborator in my work – from imprinting cloths directly with fungi, bacteria and molds in 1995; to working with SEMs of hornwort spores during my 2004 ANAT residency with Dr Christine Cargill, Curator of the Cryptogam Herbarium, Australian National Botanic Gardens. My latest body of work ‘The Hidden Sex’ explores 19th century women seaweed collectors, working across the mediums of textiles, embroidery, cyanotype, glass, seaweed and cuttlefish.

Kathleen Winter, Verdun, Quebec

I am currently absorbed in a three year project helping transcribe the previously unpublished journals Dorothy Wordsworth (Sister of the poet William Wordsworth) wrote late in life. (Her early journals written in youth are published and famous.) I am doing this for the Wordsworth Trust in the UK. I am also writing a novel based on my findings, to be published by Knopf in 2021. Dorothy Wordsworth was a botanizer in the 19th century amateur tradition, and she collected many mosses, lichen and other specimens, and used a folding botanical microscope invented by the pre-eminent field guide author of her day (Withering). My own studies include sympathetic amateur observation using a powerful magnifier on long walks. I am particularly interested in lichen, fungi and mushrooms. My mushroom interest extends into making medicinal tinctures using homeopathic and spiritual principles as well as nutritional knowledge. I normally walk along the St. Lawrence near my Verdun home, and in the woods of the Eastern Townships, sketching and studying plant life along with Dorothy's writings. The retreat you are proposing would be a wonderful way for me to learn deep things about the mushrooms, lichen and fungi Dorothy knew and loved.

Suus Agnes Claessen, New Zealand

I am an author-illustrator and comics artist with a background in science communication, literary studies, and beekeeping. My work takes a particular
interest in environmental ethics and the underdog. As a PhD candidate at the Centre for Sustainability, Otago University, New Zealand, I currently work on a graphic novel about human relationships with 'unloved' microcommunities of invertebrates, moss, and fungi. This is part of my interdisciplinary research that explores visual narrative as a method for cultivating attentiveness to nonhumans.

I look for ways to better coexist with my environments through different ways of knowing them —from folklore and myth to traditional and contemporary ecological knowledges— and let these stories colour my daily observations and actions, as I’m learning to read my surroundings intimately; perhaps even communicate with them. Who am I to them? Who responds to the seeds and spores I spread?

By engaging story and sense in processes of getting to know other beings, my creative practice seeks to bring them to wider cultural imaginations. It’s too easy to overlook or disregard them as backdrops to human life. By reviving forgotten wisdoms, I wish to contribute to a broader recognition of nonhumans in all shapes and sizes, not just for their importance and wondrousness, but also as life forms in their own rights, alive and aware, creatures full of story and for who things matter.

Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.