Mushroom music and Beatrix Potter: Exeter exhibition explores the cultural world of fungi

Lara Goodband, the head curator at the museum, said the show had been five years in the making. She suggested south-west England was a good place to focus on fungi. "We have great weather for it, warm and damp," she said. "But also, I think people here have a special affinity for fungi."

Goodband said fungi enthusiasts in the region range from ecologists who study the role fungi play in soil health to ravers who enjoy the hallucinogenic properties of some mushrooms and storytellers who work with the fairytale associations of toadstools. The museum's Victorian fungal collections, including specimens of stinkhorn and bird's nest fungi, are displayed alongside the contemporary pieces.

She said interest in fungi had risen sharply over the past few years, partly after the success of Merlin Sheldrake's book Entangled Life, which argued that fungi provide a key understanding of the planet. "I think we've hit a moment," she said.

Among the highlights is a sound installation, The Intelligence Below, by the musician, composer and DJ Jason Singh, who spent hours in two Devon woods, Fingle and Yarner, gathering material. He said he used biofeedback sensors to measure the electricity coming from mycelium, the rootlike networks of fungi, and translated it into sound. "So all the notes that you are hearing are translations of voltage being emitted from the living thing. This is music being generated by the living system of the mushroom," he said. He added that he was interested in the idea that all living things generate and vibrate, and that this was a way to tune into and connect with other living things. Passersby sometimes gave him odd looks as he worked, he said, "but it's magical being in a space recording mushrooms".

Watercolour studies by Beatrix Potter, loaned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, are also on show. Her mycological work was overlooked in her lifetime but is recognised by modern mycologists. Nearby is a recent work, In Balance by the artist Jo Pearl, a kinetic sculpture based on an extinct fungus called Potteromyces asteroxylicola, named after Potter in 2023 when it was identified in the collections of the Natural History Museum.

Another new piece is by Gemma Anderson-Tempini, who worked with scientists from the University of Exeter's MRC Centre for Medical Mycology to create a map of her own mycobiome, the fungi dwelling within the human body. She collected pieces of red sandstone from Exmouth and chocolate-brown soil from Killerton, which she ground up to make the watercolours used in her piece Myco-Mother, 2026. "Every one of us is carrying a fungal ecology and until now nobody had drawn it," she said. "Fungi is fashionable but Sheldrake and the rest stayed outside the body in forests and soil. This work turns it inward."