‘Myco-Mother’
Commission for ‘Living Labyrinths: Art & Fungi’ opens 3 October 2026 and runs until 21 February 2027, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. Featured in the Guardian national press 30/09/26.
Alongside the newly commissioned work ‘Myco-Mother’ are my other artworks, rhyme (+audio) and texts that explore micro and macro fungi (below).
About the commissioned work:
‘Myco-Mother’ is a life-size drawing that maps the fungal communities living in and on the human body, the mycobiome, across a breastfeeding figure: a mother and two infants, at the moment one person’s mycobiome begins to become another’s.
The body is understood here as a donut rather than a sealed container: an outer skin surface and an inner mucosal tube running continuously from mouth to anus, branching into the lungs. Inside and outside are, topologically, the same surface. The drawing belongs to a tradition of transparency figures, images in which interior and exterior are held within the same plane without dissection, so that skin and gut, surface and depth, can be seen at once.
The outer body is drawn in earth pigments gathered from Devon geology, Exmouth red sandstone and the volcanic soils of Killerton Estate. The inner tube is painted in watercolour, its colours chosen by pH, wet and unstable, bleeding into one another like the mucosal environment it depicts.
The breastfeeding section of the map is rendered more faintly than any other territory. Less is known about fungi in breastmilk, and that faintness is not a stylistic choice but an epistemic one: a document of the current limits of scientific knowledge.
The figure was traced from my own body, and based on my own experience of tandem breastfeeding twins, and developed in close collaboration with researchers at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology, University of Exeter. It is at once particular, my own body, my own children, and universal: an image of the fungal communities we inherit from birth.
