Black Spores

H-110cm x W-83cm x 5cm
Timber, fire and oil

BLACK SPORES A First-Person Account from the Artist Who Probably Should Have Left It in the Paddock

Most people find their materials in art supply stores. Clean places. Places with good lighting and a checkout counter and a person who asks if you found everything okay. I found mine rotting in a wet paddock, unprotected, with absolutely no plan.

This is how the work begins. Not with inspiration. With poor decision-making in damp conditions.

The slab was white coastal mahogany — or had been, once, in some previous life when it still had opinions about itself. By the time I got to it, it had been lying in standing water long enough to forget what wood was supposed to feel like. The fungus had moved in completely and without apology, the way fungus does, the way anything does when it senses that something has been abandoned and is no longer being defended. There were mushrooms erupting from every surface. Living ones. Aggressive ones.

And I just — picked it up. With my hands. Like a civilian. Like someone who had not been briefed on what happens when you disturb a colony of spores that has been quietly running its own operation in a wet Queensland paddock for God knows how long. I loaded it into the truck unprotected, drove it back to the workshop, carried it inside, and only then — only once I was enclosed in a room with it, only once the disturbance was total and the spores were doing what disturbed spores do — did I think: perhaps some kind of protective equipment would be appropriate here.

The hazmat suit arrived too late to be heroic. It arrived in time to be necessary. There's a difference and I lived it.

But once I was sealed in, once the face shield was down and the situation was contained, something clarified. The biological assault became observable rather than personal. I could look at what the fungus had actually done to this wood — not with panic but with the specific attention that only comes when you have recently been humbled by something microscopic and are now operating behind a barrier of polyethylene and dignity.

And what it had done was extraordinary. The grain had been opened. Softened in some places, hardened in others, the surface transformed into something that had already started becoming the piece — already radiating outward from the knots and eyes of the wood in patterns that were, unmistakably, spore patterns. Growth rings. Fruiting bodies. The fungus had been making the sculpture for years before I arrived. I was just the one who showed up to finish the argument.

I burned it. Of course, I burned it. When something has been eaten by the earth you don't sand it back to something pretty — you take it further into the darkness, you char it, you commit to the transformation rather than apologise for it. The burning sealed everything. Turned the surface black and permanent and honest in the way that only burnt things are honest — because fire removes the option of pretending.

Then I carved. Those radiating forms — each one a spore frozen mid-burst, each one a small explosion of biological intent made permanent in charred mahogany — they came from the paddock as much as from the chisel. I was just following instructions left by the fungus.

The slab split along its own internal logic, the way old things do. I let it. Two panels now — same event, different angles, both true. A diptych that was always a diptych, waiting for me to stop pretending it was one thing.

What I made from the rot is a monument to the rot. To the spores I inhaled before I knew better, to the paddock, to the mahogany's long argument with the earth that I interrupted just in time to call it art.

The hazmat suit is still in the workshop.

I should probably return it.

The fungus was right about the wood. I was just the last to know.