Alexandra Park Exhibition Brief
I have chosen Alexandra Park as the venue for exhibiting my work due to the scope of what you could achieve there and the fact that it’s a community outdoor space. In my practice I focus primarily on being in the moment and creating work where I intuitively react to outside environments and nature using photography, video and sound. I create moving image sound pieces that are site specific. What interested me about this space was the many different aspects to the park and what it supports, children’s play, wildlife, art & culture and health & wellbeing. These are some of the themes I have found within my work so far. I had many different ideas that came to mind when the brief was given such as a video installation, a sound mapping piece and ideas about psychogeography or the park and its history.
Initial image research at the park
The initial stages of the exhibition planning were to go to the park and gather some inspiration on what we might like to do for the project. I was able to group the images into sections so I could see what jumped out at me most.
The Park
Trees within the park
Mushrooms
What caught my eye the most was the mushrooms. I had never seen so many on one tree stump before. These are Sulfur Tuft's, a poisonous type of mushroom that feeds on decaying rotten wood. The visual of them all climbing and clambering on top of one another, not caring whether or not they squash each other in the process. Well they wouldn't they don't have brains do they? It led me on to more research around mushrooms.
I found out that the mushrooms that we know and see are actually the fruiting body of the mushroom. The mushroom itself, or rather the mycellium is the actual mushroom part and it lives and grows under in the earth hidden. Its like a secret web of communication.
It fascinated me and intrigued me as to how much of a huge part in the ecosystem they play. The fact that they can break down toxic substances is something that really interested me, but also how some types are poisonous to humans.
I then did some artist research and looked at some artists that use mushrooms as a concept/idea within their work and found many many artists that did. More on this in another post.
How could I use mushrooms as a concept within my own practice?
What about mushrooms do I find so interesting?
How can I portray this to an audience within an exhibition?
These are some questions I will be asking myself.
Mushrooms vs Humans
We share the same DNA as mushrooms which is very interesting and they are related more closely to animals and humans than to plants!
So there are two aspects here that I could concentrate on:
Humans & Mushrooms sharing the same DNA
We are nearly 100% alike as humans and equally closely related to mushrooms. Only a few tiny changes in our DNA structure set us apart, giving us our variations in eye, skin, and hair color. We are technically all related and we are similar to the mushroom. Some fungi can even move or seem to crawl.
2. How mushrooms can break down toxic substances that humans create such as plastic, petrol and pesticides.
Pesticides are chemical compounds used by man to control organisms which threaten his well-being. Petroleum, also called crude oil, is a fossil fuel. Like coal and natural gas, petroleum was formed from the remains of ancient marine organisms, such as plants, algae, and bacteria. Their crude oil is extracted with giant drilling machines. Plastics typically are made through human industrial systems. Most modern plastics are derived from fossil fuel-based chemicals like natural gas or petroleum; however, recent industrial methods use variants made from renewable materials, such as corn or cotton derivatives.
Humans and mushrooms could work together to combat climate change.
In depth research into Mushrooms and climate change - Article created on August 3, 2018
by Colin Averill & Jennifer M. Bhatnagar
Certain fungi play an important role in how well forests can absorb carbon dioxide.
Two Boston University researchers, Colin Averill and Jennifer M. Bhatnagar, explain below how these fungi fit into forest microbiome and fight climate change, as well as how we can safeguard them for the future. Their paper is published in Global Change Biology.
Fungi represent an entire kingdom of life on Earth. When you think of fungi you might visualize mushrooms in something you eat, or mushrooms that pop up along the forest floor. But some fungi, called mycorrhizal fungi, can exist entirely underground, growing symbiotically with the roots of trees.
These fungi may not be visible to us, but our research group has found that these mycorrhizal fungi are doing us a huge climate favor behind the scenes. These fungi are climate change warriors, helping forests absorb CO2 pollution, delaying the effects of global warming, and protecting our planet.
Yet human activity and pollution are causing forests to lose these fungal carbon guardians, and the loss of these fungi may be accelerating climate change.
How do forests slow climate change?
Human fossil fuel consumption emits CO2 into the atmosphere, a heat-trapping gas that drives global warming and climate change. The higher the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet will be.
Lucky for us, not all of our CO2 emissions go straight into our atmosphere. Instead, forests all over the world are protecting us from even faster rates of climate change by absorbing CO2. Forests are currently absorbing approximately one third of all human CO2 emissions. This happens when trees “eat” CO2 during the process of photosynthesis. When this happens, the carbon in CO2 gas is converted into plant biomass, and eventually locked up in tree trunks and forest soils.
As long as those carbon molecules stay in the forest, they stay out of the atmosphere, preventing them from contributing to global warming.
What do mycorrhizal fungi have to do with this?
While the trees in a forest may be absorbing the CO2 molecules, they don’t do this alone. Forests have a microbiome, consisting of all kinds of microorganisms that grow in sync with trees. While any forest can absorb CO2 and in turn offset climate change, some forests are much better at this than others.
Scientists have come to learn that understanding which forests are best at absorbing CO2 requires understanding which mycorrhizal fungi are present in that forest’s microbiome. Trees form partnerships with many different root fungi, but scientists have learned that particular root fungi, called ectomycorrhizal fungi, are helping trees absorb CO2 even faster.
Furthermore, ectomycorrhizal fungi can slow down decomposition, a natural process that returns carbon from forest soils back to the atmosphere. In these ways, ectomycorrhizal fungi enhance the ability of forests to keep carbon locked up in trees and soils, and out of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, a different type of pollution—nitrogen pollution—is causing forests to lose these fungal carbon guardians, amplifying a natural source of CO2 emissions and accelerating climate change.
Humans have polluted forests all over the world with massive amounts of nitrogen. This is because burning fossil fuels does not only emit CO2 pollution, but also nitrous oxide gas, which eventually rains down on forests as nitrogen pollution. Nitrogen fertilizers used on farms also contribute when these fertilizers blow into neighboring ecosystems.
It turns out that trees partnered with ectomycorrhizal fungi are extremely sensitive to this nitrogen pollution. By layering maps of nitrogen pollution over the distribution of forests in the United States, our research team has discovered that forests exposed to high levels of nitrogen pollution have far fewer trees that harbor ectomycorrhizal fungi.
What’s more, we were able to link a loss of these fungi to a loss of carbon from forest soils. Nitrogen pollution drives a loss of ectomycorrhizal fungi, and losing these fungal carbon guardians results in more CO2 pollution entering the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.
What’s surprising about this study is the massive scale. Our research team analyzed thousands of forest plots from all over the United States comprised of tens of thousands of trees. We were truly surprised that small changes in microscopic soil fungal communities (the forest microbiome) can lead to landscape-level changes in where different forests are, detectable at the scale of an entire continent. While our study only considered forests in the United States (because this is where scientists have the most forest data), these findings have implications for forests all over the world.
How can we save the fungi?
There is some hope on the horizon. Nitrogen pollution is actually decreasing in the United States, as America transitions away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of energy. We may make America ectomycorrhizal again.
In the process, restoration of ectomycorrhizal forests may remove additional CO2 from the atmosphere and slow climate change. However, nitrogen pollution is on the rise in developing parts of the world as more and more fossil fuel–burning power plants come online. These places are experiencing levels of nitrogen pollution often several times greater than even the highest rates ever observed in the United States. Yet even here mitigation is possible.
Technology exists to scrub nitrous oxide out of fossil fuel emissions and should be implemented not only to save the fungi and protect carbon, but also to mitigate the known carcinogenic effects of nitrous oxide pollution (think the Volkswagen emissions scandal). Better than scrubbers, development of wind, solar, and other alternative energy technologies will allow us to transition away from fossil fuels, stopping both nitrous oxide and CO2 emissions.
Putting an end to nitrogen pollution will help us conserve and save these carbon-protecting fungi, and in turn help save the planet."
How can I portray this in a video installation?
There is also another line of enquiry into mushrooms and humans, how some types of mushrooms, Psilocybin mushrooms, commonly known as magic mushrooms, mushrooms or shrooms, are a polyphyletic, informal group of fungi that contain psilocybin which turns into psilocin upon ingestion. In my research I found an interesting article in The Guardian, by Josh Jacobs, 2019.
"Lying on a bed in London’s Hammersmith hospital ingesting capsules of psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, Michael had little idea what would happen next. The 56-year-old part-time website developer from County Durham in northern England had battled depression for 30 years and had tried talking therapies and many types of antidepressant with no success. His mother’s death from cancer, followed by a friend’s suicide, had left him at one of his lowest points yet. Searching online to see if mushrooms sprouting in his yard were the hallucinogenic variety, he had come across a pioneering medical trial at Imperial College London.
Listening to music and surrounded by candles and flowers in the decorated clinical room, Michael anxiously waited for the drug to kick in. After 50 minutes, he saw bright lights leading into the distance and embarked on a five-hour journey into his own mind, where he would re-live a range of childhood memories and confront his grief. For the next three months, his depressive symptoms waned. He felt upbeat and accepting, enjoying pastimes he had come to feel apathetic about, such as walking through the Yorkshire countryside and taking photographs of nature.
“I became a different person,” says Michael. “I couldn’t wait to get dressed, get into the outside world, see people. I was supremely confident – more like I was when I was younger, before the depression started and got to its worst.”
The trial, finished in 2016, was the first modern study to target treatment-resistant depression with psilocybin, a psychedelic drug naturally occurring in around 200 species of mushroom. To varying degrees, Michael and all 18 other participants saw their symptoms reduce a week after two treatments, including a high, 25mg dose. Five weeks later, nine out of 19 patients found that their depression was still significantly reduced (by 50% or more) – results that largely held steady for three months. They had suffered from depression for an average of 18 years and all had tried other treatments. In January this year, the trial launched its second stage: an ambitious effort to test psilocybin on a larger group and with more scientific rigour (including a control group, which Michael’s study lacked), comparing the drug’s performance with escitalopram, a common antidepressant. The team has now treated about a third of the 60 patients and say that early results are promising for psilocybin.
Imperial’s current work is among a string of new studies that a group of professors, campaigners and investors hope will lead to psilocybin’s medical approval as a transformative treatment. Others soon to begin include an 80-person study run by Usona Institute, a Wisconsin-based medical non-profit, and a trial at King’s College London, as well as a 216-person trial that is already under way around the US, Europe and Canada, managed by the London-based life sciences company Compass Pathways. Robin Carhart-Harris, head of Imperial’s Centre for Psychedelic Research and a Compass scientific adviser, believes psilocybin could be a licensed medicine within five years, or potentially even sooner. “By about that point,” he says, “it would be like an irresistible force, and indefensible to ignore the weight of the evidence.”
Psilocybin mushrooms have been part of religious rituals for thousands of years. The Aztecs of Mexico referred to the mushroom as teonanácatl, or “God’s flesh”, in homage to its believed sacred power. In 1957, Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist working for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, isolated psilocybin from the mushroom. Fifteen years earlier, he had accidentally ingested LSD, left work feeling dizzy, and experienced its psychedelic effects when he got home. During the 1960s, Sandoz sold psilocybin and LSD for research in medical trials, but the substances were soon outlawed after they became associated with the 60s counterculture.
Psilocybin remains in the most restricted category today under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the US 1970 Controlled Substances Act and the 1971 UK Misuse of Drugs Act, among others. David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychoparmacology at Imperial, who is overseeing the current trials, disputes the evidence for this, saying that heavily restricting the drug (and other psychedelics) has hindered research and propelled “lies” about its risks and medical potential. For him, the decision is “one of the most atrocious examples of the censorship of science and medicine in the history of the world”.
It is interesting to me how mushrooms have been a part of religious rituals for thousands of years.
Could I do a video installation based on the psychoactive effects after taking mushrooms?
Could I do a video based on as if I was a mushroom, what would a mushroom say or do? The journey of a mushroom? A mushroom morhping into a human and a human morphing into a mushroom?
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