Sylvia Plath’s poem Mushrooms is a sinister paean to the natural world. Her observations on fungi are freighted with foreboding, noting how “very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly” they “Take hold on the loam, / Acquire the air”. The poem ends: “We shall by morning, / Inherit the earth. / Our foot’s in the door.”
Plath’s ominous ode from 1959 forms the opening salvo in an exhibition dedicated to fungi’s creepy omniscience. Far from merely getting a foot in the door, the door has been blasted off its hinges by fungi’s preternatural capacity to reproduce, spread, evolve – and annihilate. How they thrive with a perverse intensity on discarded, dead and dying things, impelling the cycle of decay and regrowth. As coprophiliacs, necrophiliacs and silent assassins, they are legion, and have been around for over a billion years.
