Mycelium Mail (2021)

By

Anna Horton Cremin

Mycelium mail postcard designed by Kitty Hopking. An illustration showing 4 red trees with colourful leaves whose roots are visible beneath the green soil. There is a red sun in the sky. The postcard reads ‘Mycelium Mail’ in white text.

Mycelium mail postcard designed by Kitty Hopking. An illustration showing 4 red trees with colourful leaves whose roots are visible beneath the green soil. There is a red sun in the sky. The postcard reads ‘Mycelium Mail’ in white text.

 

Mycelium mail is a socially distanced postal game that encourages neighbours to get to build their own community mycelium network through, play, growing, sharing recipes and thinking about the future.

Mycelium mail will encourage people from Limehurst to take part in a series of actions and creations that will lead up to the planting of 15 trees on Limehurst Estate. These trees will be a gift to the future. We will use these trees to help us imagine what the future might be like when they are fully grown. How our actions today might shape that future in 100s of years time. We will work with up to 15 families to create the work.

Did you know trees communicate with each other? They use a fungal network called mycelium to do this. It is found under the ground and can be likened to a trees’ internet or postal service. These networks can be hundreds of years old. Trees use it to tell each other about pests, drought and danger.

They also use mycelium networks to share nutrients between each other. If a tree in the network doesn’t have enough nutrients or water in it’s soil, the other trees can pass it to them through the mycelium. If a tree is planted on it’s own, it often gets sick. It needs its forest support system to stay healthy just as humans need social networks to stay happy.

In Limehurst we are going to create our own version of a mycelium network, using the mail. Each family that takes part will receive a mycelium mail pack. This pack will contain instructions. These packs will then be posted to each other (through a central location) for the next family to add to. By the end of the project we will have a collaborative piece of work that will have ideas and actions of all the families on each pack.

I will use prompts from a workshop, Human Layers, by Long Time Project, which encourages you to look into the past and future through the people you know and love. The workshop ends with you toasting your future self for what they have done. These mycelium challenges will be broken into 3 growing challenges. We will use these growing challenges to think about time and connect with each other. Each growing challenge takes a different length of time to grow - these timeframes will be used as prompts to think about the future and time.

Leaflet set to all families taking part in Mycelium Mail, designed by Kitty Hopking. To enlarge, click the image.

Leaflet set to all families taking part in Mycelium Mail, designed by Kitty Hopking. To enlarge, click the image.

More information: www.annahortoncremin.com

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Anna Horton Cremin

Anna Horton Cremin uses games and play to bring people together in new and unexpected ways. She uses playful interventions to talk about complex issues including what we want our future world to be like. Her practice is currently looking at how the first playgrounds were created: built by children out of the materials they found in the destruction and dereliction of WWII. These acts of building and playing started the adventure playground movement, allowing children to take risks and create their own environments. She is using these methods to explore themes around climate change and the natural envrioment. Through Anna’s practice, she wants to encourage audiences to take risks by building their own play spaces, giving chances for people to imagine alternative futures together. Anna Horton Cremin (b.1991) is an artist living and working in Manchester. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Birmingham City University in 2013. Recent commissions include; Park Portals, Rediscovering Salford, 2020; Outside In, Rule of Threes, Bootle, 2020; Games Generator (Forest of Imagination, Bath, Make My Day, Morecambe Bay and Love Parks Week and Festival of Manchester, 2019); Third Room Residency, Left Coast (Blackpool, 2019); Good Game, (Ampersand Projects, Birmingham 2018); She has been selected for Social Art Summit (Sheffield 2018); Artist Jamboree (Devon, 2018) and Creative 50 (Manchester International Festival 2017). She is resident at Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol. As part of my recent collaborative duo One Five West (with Sophie Bullock) we were commissioned for Wild Worlds Festival, Chester Zoo, 2018. We were also selected for the Arts+Tech creative practice accelerator, one of three £1m national pilots, set up by ACE & Innovate UK. Collaborative exhibitions include ‘WARP Festival’, The Whitworth, 2016 ‘Hello Shenzhen’, the V&A 2016 & ‘DigiLabs’, University of Manchester 2016. We were selected for ‘New Talent Residency’ at Pervasive Media Studio, 2016.

www.annahortoncremin.com

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