Mycellium and fungus in general have been a renewed interest as of late. Some of this is undoubtedly narrowed or zoomed in by the current fear of ecocide most of us are experiencing as we watch wildfires decimate geographies familiar and unfamiliar, as we are forced to watch data centers spring up around natural aquifiers- “If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw… my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!”
Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey from 2019 also examines the life underneath our feet, the largest living organic carpet in the world, while doing so with a poignant urgency. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures reaches similar conclusions about the unacknowledged land of the topic.
With all of this in mind, it is no wonder that artists such as Ron Jude, Ying And, Jason Fulford, and Heidi Sprecker have all found aesthetic value in the topic. With these artists, there is less of a lean toward the metaphoric potential of the mushroom, instead looking after the organism with a kind of sculptural awareness, with overtones of speaking about the fungi as if they were part of a separate taxonomy from that of human beings, and yet, there are some shared possibilities for using the fungi as a way to speak on several bodily manifestations of their being with our own.
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In Ying Ang’s (Perimeter, 2025) beautiful book of fungi, the metaphor suggests that the lifespan of fungi is similar to that of women’s reproductive lifespan. Ecologically inherent, the book offers a sublime look at sporocarps, or Fruiting Bodies, organisms whose main function is to reproduce and perpetuate the species. Fruiting Bodies are the above-ground and visible part of the mycelium, whose vast unseen network lies below the ground. Fruiting Bodies carry the metaphor of the female cycle by examining elements of the larger mycelial colony as they come to bloom, exhibiting their reproductive moment before shriveling, recoiling, and eventually shrinking into nothingness. There is something beautiful and deathly to the work, and it is fully engaging, with many images that almost suggest a natural history book or guide. But given the magnitude of the imagery, the fungi become very dominant on the page, exacerbated by lush color offset by monochrome interludes.
In looking at the book, without much foreknowledge or comprehensive reading, I found a synopsis of Katheryn Harlan’s book Fruiting Bodies: Stories that felt like an apt companion, or vice versa, for Ang’s book. The synopsis Fruiting Bodies ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters—mostly queer, mostly women—on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis, and feel like a sympathetic fit to the work in Ang’s book.
With this in mind, I also find the world created in images hypnotic and enduring. Though there are focal metaphors to employ, I think the long line of textbook images from science class makes equal sense within the context of the work. I am drawn back to middle school, watching a nostalgic flip of the slide carousel, looking at my biology book, contemplating scribbling in marginalia for future generations of kids who might find my apocryphal notes littered on the pages alongside cordycepts, fngi, and these elegant fruiting bodies. Color photography can often evoke a strange, nostalgic feeling. I get the same distinctive emotion, a recall to memory when I look at color postcards from the mid-20th Century. It is uncanny, but dreamy in a pleasant way, technicolor, with deep, profound reds beating under the thumb, similarly to Ang’s use of red, which indicates everything from placenta to menses.
It has taken me a little time to wrap my head around the book, and I suggest that one does not need to see the symbolic overtures to enjoy it. It is, on its face, excessively beautiful, with an urgent ecology playing at its core, but when you add the engendered insight, it becomes visceral, something unintentional at first glance, but essential on the whole. I might also mention that I think the Perimeter team and the printer Wilco did a wonderful job of bringing the book to life. Narelle Brewer’s elegant design with the Perimeter team adds a concise weight to the work and never strays into the sad territory of overdesign that many photobooks wander into these days. Highly recommended
