The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Anna Tsing.
I first heard about this book at the MA Fine Art interim show last March. Someone had brought it up in conversation while they were asking me about my connection to trees and this recurrent theme in my work, and if I would be interested in exploring it more at PhD level when the time came. They thought it would be helpful for my practice. While on the train back home after the low residency week I made sure to take a note of it to get a copy and read it when the time was right. I carried it with me for almost a year before I finally listened to it, which perhaps says something about how I tend to hold onto things before I am ready for them.
Anna Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom across continents, economies, and forest ecosystems. It is one of the most valuable mushrooms in the world and grows only in disturbed land, in the spaces left behind by logging, nuclear damage, and human disruption. What Tsing is really writing about, though, is how life and meaning and value emerge through entanglement. She calls it "collaborative survival." The idea that nothing survives alone, and that survival itself is a relational thing.
The word that keeps coming back to me from the book is "assemblage." Tsing uses it to describe how a forest, a market, a history, and a community of foragers can all be present simultaneously in a single object, a single moment. It is not something I had language for before, but I recognise the feeling of it. My own work has always been interested in connection, in the way abstract marks accumulate and speak to each other, in how a place leaves itself on a surface. The assemblage idea does not change what I make, but it gives me a different way of understanding the conditions in which making happens.
The part of the book I found most challenging was Tsing's argument that collaboration does not require sameness. The matsutake only grows through a relationship with specific trees, and that relationship depends on difference as much as proximity. What moves between them is not agreement, but something more honest. I have been thinking about that in relation to my own art practice, particularly around how I work with materials. Ink on plywood behaves differently depending on the surface preparation, the humidity, the grain of the wood, and that is different again with how ink behaves on canvas board or paper. I have always thought of that as something to navigate. However, more recently in my practice it is these textures and distributions to the ink that I am trying to lean into and notice rather than manage.
There is also a section on time that stood out to me. Tsing describes what she calls "patchy time," the idea that different beings and systems exist on different timescales that occasionally brush up against each other. The mushroom does not grow on a human schedule. The forest does not recover on one either. With Gynack I was beginning to understand the canvas as its own kind of communication network, something felt before it is understood, running on its own signal rather than a conscious one. Tsing's patchy time feels related to that. The periods of stillness in my practice that used to read as absence are starting to feel more like the pauses between root signals, present and purposeful even when nothing visible is happening.
Reading this after The Living Mountain has been interesting. Both books are concerned with what it means to be in genuine relation with something, whether that is a mountain or a market or a forest floor. Both resist the idea that meaning comes from above, from an overview or a plan. Tsing talks about noticing what she calls "the arts of living on a damaged planet," the small, specific acts of attention that allow us to find life in unexpected places. I think that is what I am trying to do in my art practice. To keep noticing. And to trust, as I am slowly learning with the trees and the wider landscape, that something growing at its own pace, in its own direction, is not growing wrongly.
