In the woodlands and galleries of Devon, a quiet revolution in perception is underway. Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum has opened Living Labyrinths, an exhibition five years in the making that asks visitors to reconsider fungi not as background organisms but as collaborators, ancestors, and intimate companions — present in forests, in history, and within the human body itself. At a moment when popular culture is rediscovering what ecologists have long understood, the show weaves together sound art, Victorian watercolors, and medical science to suggest that the most consequential networks
Devon museum celebrates fungi's 'cultural world' with sound art and scientific collaboration
Every one of us is carrying a fungal ecology and until now nobody had drawn it
Mark
So a DJ is making music from mushrooms. How does that actually work?
Mimi
Singh uses sensors to measure the electrical signals that mycelium—the fungal network underground—naturally emit. He translates those voltage readings into sound. It's not synthesized; it's a direct conversion of what the fungi are already doing.
Luke
But is he really "collaborating" with the fungi, or is he just recording electrical activity and turning it into audio? The fungi aren't responding to him.
Mimi
That's a fair question. Singh frames it as collaboration because he's trying to listen to and amplify something the fungi are already expressing. Whether that's true collaboration or artistic interpretation depends on how you define the term.
Mark
And the exhibition itself—why now? Why fungi?
Mimi
There's been a real surge in public interest over the past few years, partly driven by books like Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, which argues fungi are key to understanding ecosystems. The museum's curator says we've reached a cultural moment where fungi matter to people in multiple ways—ecologically, spiritually, even recreationally.
Luke
The curator mentions ravers and hallucinogenic mushrooms alongside soil scientists. That's a pretty wide net. Are all those communities actually represented in the show, or is that just context-setting?
Mimi
The exhibition includes work by scientists and artists, so yes, there's genuine interdisciplinary engagement. But you're right to push back—the show itself may not fully represent all those cultural threads.
Mark
What about the Beatrix Potter connection? That seems almost random.
Mimi
It's not. Potter was a serious mycologist whose work was overlooked in her lifetime. The museum has her original watercolors, and a contemporary artist created a piece based on a fungus named after her. It's a way of recognizing overlooked expertise and connecting past and present.
Luke
One more thing—this artist Anderson-Tempini mapping her own mycobiome. Is that scientifically rigorous, or is it more artistic interpretation?
Mimi
She worked with scientists from the University of Exeter, so there's scientific input. But the final work is visual art, not a scientific diagram. It's using scientific knowledge as material for artistic expression.
Mark
So the exhibition is really about fungi as a cultural object, not just a biological one.
Mimi
Exactly. It's celebrating what fungi mean to us—ecologically, artistically, historically, even spiritually—not just what they are.
The Pulse
- A composer pressed sensors into Devon forest soil and let fungal mycelium compose music through its own electrical pulses, blurring the boundary between artist and organism.
- The exhibition arrives as public fascination with fungi tips from niche curiosity into cultural mainstream, driven by science books that reframe mushrooms as planetary keystones rather than woodland curiosities.
- Beatrix Potter's long-dismissed mycological watercolors are finally displayed alongside contemporary art, restoring a Victorian woman's scientific legacy that her own era refused to recognize.
- One artist mapped the fungi living inside her own body using pigments ground from local Devon stone, making visible an internal ecology that every human carries but almost no one has ever seen.
- Five years of curatorial work and scientific collaboration have converged in a show that positions the southwest's damp climate and deep ecological culture as the natural home for this reckoning with the fungal world.
In the woodlands and galleries of Devon, a quiet revolution in perception is underway. Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum has opened Living Labyrinths, an exhibition five years in the making that asks visitors to reconsider fungi not as background organisms but as collaborators, ancestors, and intimate companions — present in forests, in history, and within the human body itself. At a moment when popular culture is rediscovering what ecologists have long understood, the show weaves together sound art, Victorian watercolors, and medical science to suggest that the most consequential networks on Earth have been beneath our feet — and inside us — all along.
In two Devon woodlands last year, composer and DJ Jason Singh sat among the trees with sensors buried in the soil, recording something most walkers never notice — the electrical pulses of fungal mycelium spreading beneath the forest floor. He translated those voltage readings into music, framing the process as a collaboration between human and fungus. That work, titled The Intelligence Below, now anchors Living Labyrinths, an exhibition at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery that opened this autumn after five years of development.
Curator Lara Goodband chose the southwest deliberately. The region's warm, damp climate suits fungi, but so does something less tangible — a local affinity for mushrooms that runs through ecologists, storytellers, and foragers alike. The show arrives as public interest in fungi has shifted decisively toward the mainstream, accelerated by books like Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, which argued that fungi are central to understanding how the planet functions.
The exhibition also reclaims Beatrix Potter's overlooked scientific life. Her mycological watercolors, borrowed from the Victoria and Albert Museum, are displayed alongside contemporary work including Jo Pearl's In Balance, which references Potteromyces asteroxylicola — a fungal species identified in 2023 and named in Potter's honor. The pairing sets her meticulous Victorian observation in quiet dialogue with modern artistic practice.
The show's most intimate gesture belongs to artist Gemma Anderson-Tempini, who collaborated with scientists at the University of Exeter's MRC Centre for Medical Mycology to map her own mycobiome — the fungi living within her body. She ground red sandstone from Exmouth and soil from Killerton into pigment and used them to paint her internal fungal ecology. "Every one of us is carrying a fungal ecology and until now nobody had drawn it," she says. Living Labyrinths ultimately positions fungi not as exotic or remote, but as fundamental to the natural world and to ourselves.
In two Devon woodlands this past year, a musician sat among the trees with sensors pressed into the soil, listening to something most people walk past without noticing. Jason Singh, a composer and DJ, was recording the electrical pulses of fungal networks—the threadlike mycelium that spreads beneath the forest floor like a living nervous system. He translated those voltage readings into sound, creating what he calls a collaboration between human and fungus. The result is now on display at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter as part of an exhibition called Living Labyrinths, which opened this autumn to celebrate what the museum's head curator describes as the "cultural world" of fungi.
The show took five years to develop, and Lara Goodband, who led the project, chose the southwest deliberately. The region's warm, damp climate suits fungi, she explains, but there is something else at work too—a particular affinity for mushrooms that runs through the local population. Ecologists study their role in soil. Storytellers invoke their fairytale associations. Some people seek out the hallucinogenic varieties. The exhibition, Goodband suggests, arrives at a moment when public interest in fungi has shifted from niche to mainstream, partly because of books like Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, which positioned fungi as central to understanding how the planet actually works.
Singh's sound installation, titled The Intelligence Below, emerged from hours spent in Fingle and Yarner woods with biofeedback equipment. "All the notes that you are hearing are translations of voltage being emitted from the living thing," he explains. "This is music being generated by the living system of the mushroom." He describes the work as an attempt to tune into other living systems, to recognize that all organisms generate and vibrate at frequencies we rarely access. Passersby gave him strange looks while he worked, he admits, but the experience itself felt transformative—recording mushrooms in their native space.
The exhibition also honors Beatrix Potter, the Victorian naturalist whose mycological expertise was largely forgotten during her lifetime. The museum has borrowed her watercolor studies from the Victoria and Albert Museum, displaying them alongside contemporary work. One recent piece, In Balance by artist Jo Pearl, references a fungus named Potteromyces asteroxylicola—a species identified in 2023 and named after Potter in recognition of her contributions to the field. The pairing creates a conversation across centuries between Potter's careful scientific observation and modern artists' engagement with fungi.
Perhaps the most ambitious work in the show is Myco-Mother, 2026, created by Gemma Anderson-Tempini in collaboration with scientists from the University of Exeter's MRC Centre for Medical Mycology. Anderson-Tempini set out to map her own mycobiome—the fungi that live within the human body, a presence most people never visualize. She gathered red sandstone from Exmouth and chocolate-brown soil from Killerton, ground them into pigment, and used them to create watercolors depicting her internal fungal ecology. "Every one of us is carrying a fungal ecology and until now nobody had drawn it," she says. While popular science has focused on fungi in forests and soil, her work turns the lens inward, making visible what has always been present but invisible. The exhibition positions fungi not as exotic or distant but as fundamental to how we understand both the natural world and ourselves.
Notable Quotes
All the notes that you are hearing are translations of voltage being emitted from the living thing. This is music being generated by the living system of the mushroom.— Jason Singh, musician and DJ
Every one of us is carrying a fungal ecology and until now nobody had drawn it.— Gemma Anderson-Tempini, artist
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