The fungi-as-revelation moment has been building since Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life landed in 2020, and Living Labyrinths at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum is the most ambitious institutional art show yet to ride that wave. Five years in the making, it opens 3 October and runs through 21 February, pairing the museum's own Victorian stinkhorn and bird's nest specimens with contemporary commissions that range from biofeedback sound art to kinetic sculpture to watercolour self-portraiture of the human mycobiome. The headline piece is Jason Singh's The Intelligence Below, a sound installation built from hours spent in Fingle and Yarner woods with biofeedback sensors clamped to mycelial networks. Singh translated voltage fluctuations from living mycelium into musical notes — not metaphorically, but as direct signal-to-sound mapping. "All the notes that you are hearing are translations of voltage being emitted from the living thing," he says. Whether you call that collaboration or instrumentation is the productive tension at the heart of the work. Beatrix Potter's watercolour fungi studies, loaned by the V&A, anchor the exhibition's historical spine. Potter's mycological work was dismissed in her lifetime; modern mycologists have since validated it. Beside those watercolours sits Jo Pearl's In Balance, a kinetic sculpture of Potteromyces asteroxylicola — a fungus named after Potter in 2023 when it was identified in the Natural History Museum's collections. The pairing is genuinely elegant: a Victorian woman's overlooked science reframed through a 21st-century artist's mechanical imagination. Gemma Anderson-Tempini's Myco-Mother, 2026 may be the show's most quietly radical entry. Working with scientists at the University of Exeter's MRC Centre for Medical Mycology, she mapped her own mycobiome — the fungi living inside her body — and rendered it in watercolours made from ground Exmouth sandstone and Killerton soil. She claims it's a first: "Every one of us is carrying a fungal ecology and until now nobody had drawn it." The materials-as-method approach (local geology becoming pigment) is the kind of conceptual tightness that separates art-about-science from art-as-science. Head curator Lara Goodband frames the show within the south-west's particular affinity for fungi — ecologists, foragers, ravers, storytellers all converging on the same organism from radically different angles. That's an honest curatorial instinct: fungi sit at the intersection of ecology, pharmacology, folklore, and aesthetics in a way few organisms do, and the show's strength is that it doesn't flatten those perspectives into one narrative. The risk is the one that haunts every art-meets-science exhibition: that the science becomes illustration and the art becomes decoration. Living Labyrinths appears to dodge this more successfully than most, partly because several artists did genuine fieldwork (Singh in the woods, Anderson-Tempini in the lab), and partly because RAMM's own Victorian collections provide a historical depth that prevents the show from feeling like a trend piece with frames on the wall. The mushroom moment is real; this show earns its place in it.
