Fungarium: Rambling On by Jacqueline Freeman

Jacqueline Freeman returns to The Gallery at the Playroom with new artwork exploring the wonderful world of fungi

Welcome to the world of fungi where sprawling webs of mycelium weave beneath our feet and microscopic spores fill the air we breath. Its fruiting body the mushroom might be delicious nutritious mind-expanding or deadly and without it our forests would not exist. In Archway we benefit from several wooded and parkland spaces right on our doorstep: Highgate and Queen’s Woods Parkland Walk Waterlow Park and Hampstead Heath; places in which to breathe deeply and walk slowly. Beneath the canopy of the trees I find myself looking down intrigued by this subterranean network the lifeblood of the forest hidden in the earth and emerging from the darkness.

Having branched away from animals more than 1billion years ago fungi are neither plant nor animal sharing more DNA with us than they do with plants. They are master decomposers transforming and moving energy so that it may generate and support new life. They have the ability to decompose plastics and petrochemicals and to convert toxic waste into chemical energy for growth. They are intelligent communicators explorers and decision makers with species that interact with plants and trees swapping nutrients and energy in a system referred to as the Wood Wide Web. Without fungi we would not have bread beer cheese chocolate coffee wine… and yet we know very little about this abundant kingdom. There are thought to be over 2.5million fungi species on Earth* with more than 90 percent of those as yet unknown to science. Most fungi live out of sight.

In my last exhibition Fungarium I took a tentative step into these dark spaces and I now present my continuing journey in Rambling On. Over the past year I have been on mushroom forays attended a wholesome fungi festival listened to informative and magical talks at Kew Gardens and the RHS Lindley Library and have grown my own weird and wonderful mushrooms that verge on the mystical. My rambling on about mushrooms has earned me the moniker of ‘the mushroom lady’ - it has become my thing. And so I am back at The Gallery at The Playroom this July with a display of new artwork.

My pencil drawings are studied celebrations of the mushroom. I have been collecting dried specimens observing the whorling twisted shapes that occur upon dehydration with gnarly forms that conjure fantastical characters straight out of folklore. In inks I take a dive into the subterranean realm of mycelium the microscopic vegetative part of a fungus that weaves beneath our feet. As an aphantasic I do not experience mental imagery so here I just ‘see what happens’ creating imagined realms by letting the inks express themselves in damp paper before working over in more detailed layers - “If I cannot see then I can imagine”.