Mycellium connections / Please take off your shoes by Michael Blow, Cornish Caradon Granite from Lantoom Quarry, Unique, 190cm high, 65cm wide, 60cm deep
In the artist’s words…
When I responded to the Caradon Granite sponsored Stone Lane gardens title Connectivity set by Nick Parker the curator, my mind raced. Over the last few years, I have read a lot about recent research into the brain, mycelium networks, the gut biome, and the connections they have. I felt the need to carve all this into stone. One of the functions that my artwork has for me is a way to resolve and join up dots and cement my understanding of things. I have tried to express all of this in this piece of work. I realised about halfway through this piece that I was carving it in the tradition of medieval stone carvers telling a bible story through their carvings.
The overall form is that of a mycelium hyphae and I wanted to especially honour the Spitzenkorper, which is an organelle (functional part of a cell like Mitochondria and Golgi apparatus) that simultaneously directs the hyphae, communicates with the rest of the mycelium, builds the cell walls of the hyphae by firing vesicles (bubbles of an unknown compound shown on the back of the lower section as cut outs) at the tip up to 30000 times a minute, absorbs all the water and nutrients from the surrounding area that it needs and maintains the internal pressure of the Hyphae up to 6X that of a car tyre, we don’t understand how it does this, I feel the need to create another piece just for this incredible piece of biological engineering. In the piece overall I hope to have captured a sense of dynamic movement, on the lower section of the piece I have shown the mycelium reaching through the soil and absorbing nutrients and growing mushrooms as part of their life cycle, connecting trees and plants and transferring nutrients between them by way of exchange. Above that I have shown the gut biome, connected to Mycelium not only by the ingestion of mushrooms but also by the interaction with microbes and the prevalence of fungi in our own system. The gut biome is fascinating, with over 4 trillion individual microbes in our gut the connectivity within is truly awesome, they are arguably what make us human and the way they interact in our system for our and their benefit affects every part of our life and social structure. The gut biome produces hormones and affects immune responses and so much more, I have shown it’s connection to our brain with the inclusion of the vegus nerve shown here by the character appearing to pull some levers as what we eat and what our gut wants can have a massive effect on our brain function and our behaviour especially as a result of gut dysbiosis . Travelling up into the brain, a truly incredible place, with myriad connections and functions running simultaneously both in and out of our control. We are learning so much about brain function, one area that has fascinated me hugely is the difference between the left and right lobes of the brain, where the left, primarily concerned with function, logic and speech does not accept the presence of the right hemisphere whereas the right has a much wider comprehension of the bigger picture and does what it can to temper the ambitions of the left and the two create the whole. Coming out of the brain on the left are vocal waves and on the right the labyrinth of comprehension and thought and all the connections we make and maintain with these. I have tried to evoke movement in this piece by using a variety of tooling techniques which also show off the unique characteristics that granite has.
A note on the title. I have called it Mycelium connections/Please take off your shoes both in honour of the myriad connections that Mycelium make 18 miles in a teaspoon of soil and please take off your shoes because I feel with have lost our connection to nature, we have been separated from it and consider ourselves apart from it. The simple action of taking off your shoes when you can and connecting to the ground beneath us can go someway to change that (it is also good for your feet) The soil is alive with electrical impulses and our feet and our bodies are sensitive to those.
If I had one hope for this piece it would be that we would recognise that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. We are indivisible from it, we are learning so much about how connected we are to nature and all it has to teach us and we desperately need to recognise that and bring it to the front of our mind.