Several sculptures in the middle of an ancient Scottish forest valley left the world speechless. They were covered in leaves, mushrooms, and mycelium, as if they had grown directly from the forest until taking on a perfect humanoid shape.
And, in a way, that’s exactly what happened. These sculptures are alive; they continue growing and changing. However, to achieve such a precise appearance, nature received a little help. The artist responsible is Kirsten Tingle, who scanned her own body in 3D and turned it into a mold made up of 88 pieces. But instead of filling it with plaster or resin, she decided to harness the same power of nature: she used living mycelium, the root system of fungi, which can bind together the material it finds around it and functions as a natural glue while growing over the substrate.
In her studio in Hackney, London, she fed the mycelium with waste cardboard collected from businesses in the neighborhood. Each piece of the mold was designed to come apart once the fungus had finished growing and taken on the exact shape of her seated body.
The result was eventually displayed outdoors, among trees and fallen leaves, as part of the artistic trail The Neverending Glen, at Kelburn Estate, Scotland. A figure that looks like it’s made of stone or bark, but is actually alive, changing over time.
The artist lets nature itself interact with and finish the work, and perhaps that’s why seeing it in the middle of the forest is so unsettling: we don’t know how much of the sculpture belongs to the artist and how much already belongs to the fungi.