Interdisciplinary artist Keg de Souza has long been fascinated by the way space – both physical and social – is shaped, contested, and reclaimed. Trained in architecture but informed by a life spent creating in a variety of facets, she works across inflatable architecture, food, film, mapping, and participatory dialogue to explore the politics of place. Whether unpacking the forced displacement of communities through colonisation and gentrification, or using a shared meal as an entry point to difficult conversations, her practice is as much about building connections as it is about dismantling the barriers between us.

Her latest project, Growth in the Shadows, takes root at Bundanon as part of Thinking together: exchanges with the natural world (exhibiting from 1 March to 8 June 2025). Here, de Souza turns to the underground intelligence of mycelium networks, drawing poetic parallels between fungal communication and human community-building. In collaboration with mycologists, she investigates what we might learn from these sprawling, unseen systems – how they support, adapt, and persist despite external pressures. The title of the work, Growth in the Shadows, she says, refers to learning that happens away from the spotlight, in less visible spaces as well as the fact that mushrooms like a shaded area, of course.

In conversation with RUSSH, de Souza reflected on her time at Bundanon, the materiality of mycelium, and the radical potential of fungi to shift the way we understand knowledge, resilience, and connection.

What drew you to working with mycelium at Bundanon?

I was drawn to mycelium as my work is based in learning from, and with, place and often centres on how to centre lesser-known stories or voices. My ancestral lands of Goa were colonised in the 1500s until 1961, this 450 years of cultural loss has shaped and positioned my learning of place as a settler here – I live on unceded Gadigal land. At Bundanon, on the lands of the Dharawal and Dhurga language groups, this extended to the lesser-known voices of more-than-human life and asking how plants communicate with each other – which is through mycorrhizal networks – where fungal hyphae of underground mycelium are in contact with plant roots. Plants use these networks to communicate, collaborate and share resources. I was drawn to thinking about what humans can learn from these networks as a form of radical pedagogy.

What have you learned from working with mycologists on this project that surprised you?

The mycelium is housed, inside a sculptural form of a Wardian case, so I’ve been speaking to mycologists, Tom May and Jordan Bailey about the importance of how to create a whole ecosystem inside these enclosed cases, in order for the fungi to stay healthy. I have learned of so many species of fungi on the land surrounding the Museum site through seeing different ones bloom during my various visits. I think the most surprising one I saw was the fungi that had invaded the body of a cicada while it was still alive, it would have spread the spores as it continued to fly around, eventually killing it. When I saw the corpse, it had fungi blooming out of it.

Do you see parallels between fungal networks and human communities?

It’s hard not to anthropomorphise nature, in the work I am looking at how fungal networks work such as in a non-hierarchical and rhizomatic way and when I lay my own human interpretation over that I view it as a more utopian way of being – perhaps humans could learn from or aspire to the ways of mycelium. For example, when plants produce excess sugars they feed them back into the network, imagine if humans shared resources in this way, only using/taking what each person needs. Humans bound in a capitalist society for a large part tend to shy away from reciprocity – so in the work I’m questioning, what we can learn from these non-hierarchal structures? And asking – how can we be more fungal in our thinking?

Why did you choose to work with glass as the material for this piece?

The materiality of glass is an essential part of the Wardian case, the sculptural form that the mycelium is housed in within. Wardian cases were designed to function as small greenhouses to transport plants across the seas as part of the colonial project, and are enmeshed in the world of economic botany. The first test of these cases was in 1833, on board a ship from London to Sydney, inside were British ferns and grasses that survived the journey of many months.

The name Wardian case comes from Nathaniel Ward - who was a doctor, amateur naturalist and entomologist. Ward discovered that he had placed a moth pupae in a sealed glass jar with fern fronds and moist soil and after some time the condensation that had formed dripped down onto the soil and the plant sprouted and lived for three years in this micro-environment, untouched. Understanding these principles he created the Wardian case.

In my work the glass is printed with a mind map overlaying various learnings I’ve mapped out from the way mycelium function through themes of: collaboration, networks, adaptation/the future and bio/diversity.

What do you hope people will take away from your piece when it’s unveiled? Do you create with a specific message in mind for your audience, or do you prefer to leave your work open to interpretation?

Sometimes metaphors can bring poetics into understanding, without limiting it by specific language, in the work I’ve described how mycelial networks as a metaphor for how humans can collaborate and I think people will interpret this metaphor in their own way.

In the work there are various human overlays – the mind maps on the glass; the reference to Western science and economic botany through the Wardian cases; and of course a key part of the work is the sound. The Wardian cases are filled with natural materials I’ve collected from the Bundanon landscape, such as mossy rocks, leaf litter, bark and importantly logs with active mycelium and fungal blooms. These logs have clips attached to their ends, feeding their signal into a biofeedback modular synthesis patch, that I worked on with experimental sound musician, Lucas Abela. When I described the work to mycologist Tom May, he noted the importance of being able to listen to fungi in this way - as usually we can’t hear them, he even refers to the fungal kingdom as, the ‘silent kingdom’. The intention of the work highlights what we can learn from paying attention to our more-than-human kin.

Is there anything from this project that you think you will carry with you into future creative projects?

With each project I make I am always learning. These experiences, knowledges, methodologies and techniques often filter into future projects. For example, my previous works looking at the movement of plants through empire led me to learning about the Wardian case – a few years ago when researching for another project, I saw one in the Economic Botany collection at Kew Gardens.