The world beneath the forest floor is a quiet architecture of threads. Mycelium spreads like a soft intelligence, sensing, repairing and nourishing. Within this slow, interconnected network lies a language of care often overlooked by human industry. Mycelium Lace begins by listening to this language. By cultivating fungal fibres into delicate lattices, we allow growth itself to become an act of making. What emerges is neither fully designed nor fully grown, but a negotiation between organism and human intention.
Mushroom Lance, a client project with Mermaid Lucia and AgriCycle Innovation, was exhibited at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew Gardens.
Living Threads: Weaving with Growing Matter
Mycelium Lace begins with a simple question: what if the material could participate in its own making. Instead of carving or casting, we invite fungi to grow into lace-like structures, allowing metabolism to become a method of craft. Guided by a scaffold of biodegradable fibres, the mycelium spreads, binds and perforates, forming patterns that echo lacework yet remain unmistakably alive in their origin.
Regeneration as Fabrication
The project works with agricultural waste and mushroom mycelium supplied by AgriCycle Innovation. As the organism grows, it fills space selectively, creating soft membranes, branching filaments and delicate voids. When stabilised, these once-living structures become lightweight jewellery and artefacts with a quietly biological tactility. Each piece is a record of humidity, nutrient flow and time, a crystallisation of a growth process rather than a purely human-made form.
Through an ecofeminist lens, Mycelium Lace challenges extractive logics of material use. Instead of imposing form, we co-create with a living system whose agency is gentle yet insistent. The fungi’s labour is slow, patient and attentive, mirroring the undervalued forms of care that ecofeminism seeks to foreground. Growth becomes a shared authorship between human and non-human bodies, dissolving boundaries between craft, organism and ornament.
Each Mycelium Lace piece is shaped in collaboration with Mermaid Lucia in London, where biobased frameworks, hand-finishing techniques and fungal cultivation come together. The final objects carry both the delicacy of jewellery and the rawness of biological formation, merging craft precision with the unpredictable intelligence of living matter.
Various vegan leather samples made from mushrooms.
Kew Garden Exhibitions
