MUSHROOMS: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi

Mycophilia

Humanity’s long affinity with the mushroom has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Once regarded as simple vegetation, fungi have recently been recategorised into their own kingdom, having been found to be in fact more closely related to animals than plants.

Scientists now understand how this remarkable organism underpins all life on Earth. All living things exist in symbiosis with mushrooms and this multispecies entanglement is the basis of all ecosystems. This raises big questions about where species begin and end and offers incredible new possibilities for how we might think about the future of our world.

The starting point for Graham Little’s labour-intensive paintings is often vintage fashion imagery. His idyllic painting of mushroom foraging was created in response to the increasing presence of the digital in our experience of nature and pleasure.

The fungi in this neo-pastoral painting include Scarlet Waxcap and Anise Funnel Cap mushrooms, Brain Fungus, and Stump, Parasol and Giant Puffballs.

Turkish artist Lara Ögel’s collage works grew out of an interest in the subconscious and its imagery. Drawn to the appearance of mushrooms in ruins and other odd places, for Ögel fungi open up a wider discussion on existence, life and survival.

For her, mushrooms hold the promise of psychological and universal liberation.

Inspired by common graffiti found from his native Vancouver Island, Alex Morrison’s paintings of mushroom wallpaper patterns were created using Arts and Crafts pattern techniques. He is interested in how sub-cultural icons become domesticated and rendered ornamental. Here mushrooms, dreams and desires are transformed into opiates in bourgeois domestic life.

Magic Mushrooms

The relationship between mushrooms and altered states of consciousness has existed for thousands of years. The first recorded ingestion of psychoactive mushrooms comes from cave paintings in sub-Saharan Africa 10,000 years ago.

Mushrooms were part of ritualistic use in ancient Siberia, Africa and Spain. In Mesoamerica, the Mayans and Aztecs used mushrooms in divination, private healing and rituals, something that the invading Spanish colonialists fought to erase.

It was Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and R. Gordon Wasson’s work and their publication of an article in Life magazine in 1957 on modern mushroom consumption in rural Mexico that shifted people’s ideas around the mushroom forever. Fungi became a subject of scientific investigation, poetic inspiration and metaphor.

Today, the scientific community takes the use of psilocybin very seriously, with a wave of academic research on their use to treat depression and addiction, while artists, designers and thinkers are exploring the aesthetic, scientific and cultural possibilities of these strange and wonderful living things. Fungi may not only change the shape of our future world, they may also change the way we think about it.

There is a refreshing simplicity to the graphic paintings and powder coated steel sculptures created by the Chicago-based artist Cody Hudson. Known for his design work as Struggle Inc, the graphic artist’s work plays with ideas of abstraction, pattern, concrete poetry and a hand-made take on modernism. He is represented by Andrew Rafacz and is also a partner in the Michelin Star rated restaurant, Longman & Eagle.

Amanda Cobbett’s realistic 3-D sculptures are created by interweaving colourful rayon threads using free motion machine embroidery.

The stems are made from an array of hand-dyed papier mâché tubes, which are then lightly scorched to imply decay. Fine silks are hand-stitched into the base to suggest roots that have just been plucked from the ground.

A graduate of Camberwell College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, Pearch is drawn to the bodily and psychological resonance of mushrooms. His lifelike resin and epoxy sculptures resemble fungi growing out of burnt toast - a fitting metaphor for creative inspiration. Here the mushroom is a relentless force coming out of nothingness. 

Belgian shoe designer and consultant Kristel Peters worked with fashion houses Dries Van Noten and Bottega Veneta before concentrating on sustainable shoe design. Her focus is on the use of mycelium as a material with little to no environmental impact. These footwear prototypes demonstrate experiments at the intersection of bio-technology and fashion.