Fungal Fieldwork: How Did It Go?

On the 18th of October we hosted a Fungal Fieldwork at Taplin's Fields, led by our Chair, Conor Courtney.

We went looking for fungi in a scruffy, post-urban landscape of nettles, fences, dead wood, concrete and things growing where they weren’t supposed to.

Each person was assigned a fungus. Not just a name, but a way into the world: a field-guide page, an alchemical symbol, and a peculiar instruction for how to pay attention.

Follow the stinkhorn by its smell. Ask what persists after abandonment. Consider the fly agaric against the concrete, and what it means for a place to be wild, owned, neglected or reclaimed. Look for the fungus, then look for what it connects to. If you find nothing, pay attention to that too.

The tasks invited us to think through a queer kind of ecology: a world that refuses to stay neatly categorised. Bodies become habitats; dead matter becomes food; organisms cooperate, compete, transform and depend on one another in ways that unsettle the boundaries between self and other, life and death, nature and infrastructure. 

Not everything fits. Not everything needed to.

The colour red drew us towards matter, pressure and transformation. The colour blue towards perception, movement and relationships. The alchemical symbols offered strange little lenses for looking sideways at the familiar.

We returned with traces, connections and uncertainties: a hollow snail shell, a tree becoming food, nettles pushing against a fence, a question about what eats us, and what this place might become.

By the end, the landscape looked less like a collection of separate things and more like a tangle of dependencies, strange alliances and unfinished transformations. Perhaps that is one promise of our queer ecology: not to replace one fixed story with another, but to make room for ways of living and relating that our usual categories leave out.

The question was no longer simply What do we find? but What else might be possible here, if we learned to see relationships differently?