Fruiting bodies and family ghosts

The Common Inkcap is an odd little mushroom that appears to grow straight up through a concrete floor - after a few days it undergoes a process of deliquescence, disappearing completely but leaving an inky residue. I like to think of these mushrooms as symbolic bookends for a murky mushroomy time framework where my art process took on a new direction - connected to grief, loss and transformation.

The first sighting back in 2022 lead to a group exhibition Amethyst Deceiver, curated by Isobel Atacus of The Icing Room, in the location of my former Lisbon studio Atelier Concorde. Isobel awoke me (albeit slowly) to a mycelial metaphor of art making and a method of artistic collaboration. Speeding forward three years and another Inkcap was spotted on the last day of my duo exhibition Encontros with Marta Angelozzi, solidifying a year-long drawing project - one of my longest running artist collaborations to date. Both projects were sufficiently ‘inky’, and, when I think about it, quite unusually monochromatic.

After reaching a creative hiatus in 2024, I had several realisations that if I didn’t take up more space here in my home of origin I wouldn’t be able to hear my own voice. I mean artistically, but also in other ways. I started writing this Substack last January, bringing it back to the process of how art making and grief can weave together in an uncomfortable yet symbiotic relationship. Letting go of my fathers’ accumulated possessions in a gentle yet firm act of trust took up time and a lot of energy, and when I returned to the UK this week I’d almost forgetten how much work I had already done to make this space into an art studio.

While I am travelling between ‘homelands’, the question of belonging transforms into ‘how to belong’, or rather ‘how not to get disconnected’. My mycelial tendencies actively lean in toward and nourish community, and with this the connections it brings. What conspired around dinner one night was a chance to make an exhibition alongside the painter Stephen Foster - an artist I admire deeply - whom I originally showed work with a few weeks after my father passed. Thinking of this exhibition timeframe as another bookend, so to speak, I knew I had to say yes.

Finally this room becomes a working studio - alive again with potential for the future. It dawns on me that the work that I thought I was making is not about belonging, but is belonging, of course, how could I forget that everything I have been doing here in England is about me coming back to who I am, someone who arranges the pieces, and this piece happens to be an exhibition - a fruiting body where the mushroom shows itself from below the ground in order to spread its spores.

The work is taking form. The frottage working process nods gracefully to traces, memory, materiality, and roots of both plant and origin. The title - ghosts - came easily, as I saw Stephen’s oil paintings of dissolving faces in bright colours. I re-read the last line of my previous substack post - See you in January, ghosts, and laughed at the coincidence.

My ghosts are friendly, caring, and they would enjoy this moment. Yet some are not, and we often find ourselves making work in opposition to the other, to a world that seems to demand so much else from us than what we have to give in that moment. Is art making a refuge from, or a dwelling within them? Do we remain haunted for our whole lives? I know this exhition arrives at a moment where I need to let go of my ghosts, and reach the next chapter. Stephens’ wife has Alzheimer's, and may also be showing a few of her recent artworks. She is another part of this community here and we are working hard to keep her with us. Both myself and Stephen are aware of our positions as carers in some form, and we use art making as a process of connection and of searching. Art allows us to voice what is often difficult to talk about.

My father was quite obsessive, I can also feel this through how he organised his things. I have a little part of that in me too. Working so close to family can be one of the most difficult things to do. But as soon as we bring our experience to the gallery, a little bit like a good ghost story, it can become a universal tool for kinship and togetherness.

See our exhibition ghosts at Forest Arts, New Milton, Hampshire, from 25th April - 9 June 2026