Mycelial musing #1- how death can reframe life (and art)
Lets start from a deep, dark place - it's winter after all
I’ve been thinking about the non-linearity of time when it comes to art making quite a bit lately, as I’ve delved further into Fungal thinking and mycellial teachings laid out in Let’s become fungal, by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodrigues. In a nutshell, mycellium is the interface for forming symbiotic relationships with the roots of plants, to allow the exchange of nutrients, minerals, water and information between different (and same) species. I am going to use the ‘teachings’ as a framework for subsequent posts, as I am finding it helpful in understanding the interconnectedness within art and life.
I’ve always felt that the artwork comes first and foremost before the ‘explanation’ - a sort of dance between shaping the conditions for its creation and allowing it to develop freely, before the process of understanding can show itself. It was in the winter months of 2021 that I first decided to work with leaves, and later plants, and it was a departure from the prolific use of imagery through collage that I accidently invented (perhaps) a new technique of frottage using beeswax and a domestic iron.
I’ve been grappling with an underlying framework for my art-making for sometime now. About ten years, I reckon. I remember the first blog I ever wrote* when I started my practice was something to do with soil and earthworms. I believe I was using the natural metaphor of compost to describe the liminal feeling of being in between roles from an arts cafe founder/co-director to an artist. One reader, a volunteer from the cafe, really connected with the post, and became interested in my art journey. Fast forward five years and he had become not just the biggest collector of my work, but an avid organiser, frame maker, admin assistant, gallery enthusiast and most importantly, a great friend. He accompanied my artistic journey from conception to fruition - at least until 2019. He had been living with a cancer diagnosis for around 12 years and sadly passed away on 6 Feb 2022, the same day that my father passed away (same disease, same age). An end of a chapter, yes, and an enormous shock to the system that rippled out, leaving no part of my life unscrutinised. Sandwiched inbetween a catastrophic house explosion in 2020 and the subsequent death of another close family member in 2024, the process of grief was drawn out and spattered with literal and metaphorical fire-fighting. It was through art-making that a slow and steady reconstruction of not just the visual qualities of my work but the conceptual framework behind its function became the compass back to myself. But how do we integrate all this unpaid and often unrecognised work into something more purposeful, even if it isn’t the focus of the artwork itself?
I had started a process in my art making that involved ironing the magazine pages from vintage National Geographics with beeswax. This excavated raw material became the ink for a very inaccurate method of frottage (big nod to the Surrealists) .
I became obsessed with this technique, as it freed me up from various constraints, including collage and the loadedness of the printed image, size of work, the need to frame it etc. As its scale shifted, so too could its location, site specificity, and purpose. I knew that it could be created outside of the comfort zone of the studio. In 2023 I was selectected to join an interdisciplinary residency in Italy. That’s where I came face to face with mycelium as a conceptual framework for creation, and what this metaphor could mean to my practice.
More on this in another chapter, and as its still winter I’m still composting. Intermittently I’m back in the UK, working in my late father’s study-cum-studio, having spent a slow two years sifting and redistributing his own creative tools and possessions. Torn between a nostalgia and a desire to transform, its only through thinking outside of the norms that I felt entitled to rework his things into new life. Anything that blocks me has to go, and releasing it has to be conscious. I seem to have a skill at ‘de-dooming’, as my colleagues used to call it, and I’ve always wondered what purpose that could serve in a job interview.
Luckily, perhaps, I’ve never had one, and only with myself I have to question the validity of the increasingly random interconnected life skills I’ve had to draw upon in times of need. Setting up a cafe from scratch, re-starting a life in Portugal, re-building after a house fire, helping others through transformation. The final one has been the lightbulb moment, where it all starts to actually make sense, in a job interview or otherwise. I took on the role of creative mentor in 2023, after a request from a friend, and since then it’s grown eight-fold, albeit still through word of mouth. A relief to have finally found a ‘job’ that rewards a deep sense of purpose. All that time spent ‘composting’ is finally making sense? I know I’ve developed a deeper awareness of the empathetic part in me that was getting squashed in the gallery space.
It’s only through witnessing the universal cycles in others, that I managed to step outside of my own grief phase to see that everything is in its own time and place, and all the learning is already here for us to sift through.
If you are interested in knowing more about mentoring, or composting, and how it can help you plant seeds for creative growth, check out my page online or send me a message.
*this was actually the only blog I ever wrote. I hope that this will break that cycle!
With loving memory to my dear Roy Fraser, Laureen Fraser and the one and only John Vetterlein.