Mycelial Landscapes with Merlin Sheldrake and Barney Steel
This Week from the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.
Recorded live at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London last December, this conversation between Emergence Magazine executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, renowned mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrake, and Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Barney Steel—who was behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation Breathing with the Forest—explores the mycelial webs that infiltrate and sustain our landscapes. Embracing the mystery and wonder of fungi as a means of deconstructing our Western philosophies around the self, the nature of intelligence, and the possibilities within community, each spoke to how the relational phenomenon of fungi could soften the imagined boundaries between our bodies and the great biosphere.
Read the transcript.
Artwork by Madge Evers.
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Merlin Sheldrake is a mycologist and author with a PhD in tropical ecology whose research ranges from fungal biology and the history of Amazonian ethnobotany to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. His book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures won the Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. He is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.
Barney Steel is an artist and creative director of the London-based art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, which creates transformative experiences that expand the senses, reinvigorate a sense of wonder, and deepen audiences’ connection to the more-than-human world. Barney’s multi-disciplinary art practice, which combines sculpture, installation, live performance, and mixed reality, illuminates the hidden natural forces that surround us.
