Mycoaesthetics.

One of the suggestions that came out of my most recent 1-2-1 tutorial with Jonathan was to read up about the idea of mycoaesthetics, following my reading of Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World. This is something that I am beginning to scratch the surface of and have been reading up on over the past few weeks.

The term mycoaesthetics refers to the increasingly popular interest in fungi across creative and cultural fields, including art and design, wellness, fiction, film, and even business and engineering. Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon, writing in Critical Inquiry in 2024, describe what they call a "mycological turn," and argue that it is primarily through aesthetics that fungi are being used to address ecological crisis and the failures of capitalism. The mushroom, in other words, is not just a subject. It is doing cultural work.

What I find interesting about this framing is the critical distance it introduces. It would be easy to fall into using the mycelial network as a straightforward metaphor for connection and collaboration, a reassuring image of nature as inherently cooperative. But Cecire and Solomon push back against this. They write about how the popular concept of the "wood wide web," the idea of mycorrhizal networks as a kind of underground internet connecting trees, actually tends to reduce fungi to conduits for plant communication, rather than recognising them as a kingdom with their own existence and autonomy. Fungi are persistently at risk of being absorbed into more familiar stories.

I recognise something of that risk in my own practice. My work has always been about place, about the body's relationship to landscape, and about art as a way of translating experiences that are difficult to put into words. When I read Tsing's ideas about entanglement and patchy time they felt immediately relevant, but I also noticed how quickly they could become comfortable. The danger is in using fungi as a shorthand for connection, rather than staying with what is genuinely strange and specific about them.

What stands out in the Cecire and Solomon piece is their insistence on staying honest about why fungi feel so compelling right now. They locate the mycological turn in a very specific moment, one of ecological collapse, economic crisis, and what they describe as the biopolitical capitalism of surplus life. Fungi thrive in disturbed and damaged ground. Their aesthetic weirdness, the way they are eerie and uncanny and neither plant nor animal, is not separate from their cultural appeal. It is inseparable from the conditions that make them feel urgent.

This connects back to something I have been thinking about across my whole practice. Reading Thomson's Belonging and Shepherd's The Living Mountain alongside my time in Kingussie has always been less about fungi or trees as subjects, and more about understanding what it means to be in genuine relation with a landscape. Thomson writes about being stripped bare in extreme, remote places, how the societal labels fall away and something more essential is left. Shepherd describes something similar, that sense of folding yourself into a mountain rather than simply standing before it. What both of them point to is an intimacy with landscape that goes beyond observation.

Mycoaesthetics does not replace that. But it does deepen it. Thinking about how fungi operate, below the surface, in the understory, through connection and mutual dependence, extends the same questions I was already asking about trees and ecosystems. It adds another layer to the understanding of the landscapes I return to again and again. What I am not doing is abandoning trees in favour of fungi, or moving from one metaphor to another. I am trying to pay closer attention to the full complexity of what a landscape is, and what it asks of the body and the practice that moves through it.

Reading Cecire and Solomon alongside Tsing, Thomson, and Shepherd has made me more careful with my own language. I want to keep noticing rather than resolving, which is something Tsing talks about too. And I want to stay alert to the difference between working with a concept and being flattened by it.