We are All Lichens Now (2025) sculptural sound installation, looped
An exhibition by Emily Stapleton-Jefferis and sound by Jamie Lee.
Pioneer species, lichens are among the first to colonise bare rock. Through chemical weathering they draw minerals from the inert into the cycles of the living. Emily’s artworks sculpted from foraged London clay, itself the softened residue of weathered rock, show how lichen exist at a macro scale, sharing the humanity in their body and revealing our lichen-like nature. An anthropomorphic bridge between us and them: drawing visual parallels between their bodies and our own.
Pioneer species, lichens are among the first to colonise bare rock. Through chemical weathering they draw minerals from the inert into the cycles of the living. Emily’s artworks sculpted from foraged London clay, itself the softened residue of weathered rock, show how lichen exist at a macro scale, sharing the humanity in their body and revealing our lichen-like nature. An anthropomorphic bridge between us and them: drawing visual parallels between their bodies and our own.
Taking inspiration from the histories, ecology and lichen of Nunhead Cemetery, the work seeks to transport the viewer into an emergent landscape. London clay bubbles and squelches, cracks and dries, is fired and transformed. Sound bounces, rumbles, blares, dividing the chaotic outside of the cemetery and the inner sanctuary as a multiplicitous, serene body.
Echoing the physiology of lichen, the sculpture and sound act in symbiosis, entirely more than the sum of their parts. Lichens embody a queer ecology. Being part algae and part fungi, they defy traditional scientific categorisation; having shifted from individual, to dyad, to ecosystem. Fungi’s gender frustrates Linnaean taxonomy and breaks our linear picture of the tree of life. They are our ecological blind-spot and yet demonstrate the manner in which humanity must embrace its role as a keystone species if we are to survive.
