Striking artworks reveal the beauty of mushrooms and other soil life

Soils around the world are polluted, worn out, over-fertilised and exhausted. How did we get to a place where we think of soil as dirt? Soils are buzzing with life, criss-crossed with a hard-to-fathom complexity of connections, a multitude of symbiotic partnerships between plant roots, mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

Up to half of the living biomass of soils is composed of these networks. Soils soak up about a third of the carbon humans put into the atmosphere each year. They hold three times more carbon than living biomass above ground, and twice the amount in the atmosphere. We have to rediscover the vital importance of soil in our lives and in the planet’s future – and that is the aim of a new exhibition at Somerset House in London, SOIL: The World at Our Feet, co-curated by Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy, running until 13 April.

Pictured above is a ceramic representation of fungi and their mycelial network in soil: Unearthed – Mycelium by Jo Pearl, whose stated mission is “breathing life into clay and clay into life”. Pictured below is the work A Diversity of Forms. These stunning bacterial colonies were grown by Elze Hesse and photographed by Tim Cockerill. The main picture is Fly Agaric I, by art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. This installation depicts living, pulsing underground symbiotic networks.

“We can’t cherish what we don’t know,” says Pearl. “And if we are to save our soil, we must take a closer look at what is often dismissed as ‘dirt’ and realise our lives depend on its aliveness.”