​​See Here Now: Art in a Time of Urgency

'It may be rare for wood to escape fungal attention: it is common for fungi to escape ours' (Merlin Sheldrake)

This work explores the Interbeing (interconnection) between trees and stack fungi – Turkeytail fungus (Trametes versicolor). The latter live symbiotically on trees – hence the title. Fungi are both connected and disconnected from trees as they are epiphytes, sitting on the tree’s bark without harming it, yet Turkeytail fungus decomposes the tree’s dead wood. So, this work explores how long-lived trees such as oaks can be simultaneously alive and dead.

It also questions how historical European optical framings such as fore-ground, middle-ground and back-ground operate in arboreal arenas. Forests often elude these “grounds” given that the human eye cannot traverse them easily.

Instead, this work creates a non-perspective based fabula (story) literally and metaphorically foregrounding the fungi’s role in a woodland or forest ecology. It also aims to blur time by implying how dynamic even an ancient oak woodland is through the arrangement of the “dancing” cut-out trees in the “middle-ground”.

This work combines a tree branches with digital paper prints of lichen and fungi. It forms a large scale screen connected by magnets that can traverse a space
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The specific families of fungi associated with lichens are the Ascomycota (cup and flask shaped fungi) and the Basidiomycota families of fungi.
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The magnets conjoining the lichen and fungi means that this is a highly mutable work that can respond to the specific space. It aims to visualise the dynamic and unstoppable qualities that these organisms embody.
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• https://theplacecollective.org/see-here-...
• https://www.edwinafitzpatrick.com/interb...