Exploring The Collection - Episode 5: Georgie Gerrard

Exploring the Loughborough University collection with our university’s curator David Bell ✨
In our fifth episode we’re taking a look into Georgie Gerrard's 'Six Locations: Durdle Door'.
This remarkable sculpture is one in a series of eleven works that combine Georgie Gerrard’s interest in biomaterials with a personal interrogation of location, geology and family history. It’s bound together by mycelium, the root structure of fungi, a material with a wide range of potential applications in fields as diverse as construction, fashion, furniture, agriculture and pollution remediation. Gerrard is inspired by the potential environmental benefits of these applications, but is also fascinated by its aesthetic properties. Indeed, Six Locations: Durdle Door shows a real fidelity to mycelium’s visual and tactile character, down to the emergence of the mushrooms themselves from the top of the sculpture.
The sculpture’s form is inspired by Durdle Door, a natural limestone arch on the Dorset Coast. Gerrard’s grandfather was a geologist who frequented the area on field trips, and the substrate through which the mycelium has grown includes organic materials local to the location. The other sculptures in the series relate to further locations of importance for Gerrard’s family, and she conceives of the works as a ‘unified body of artefacts connected by the mycelium that permeates them.’
Making work from such organic materials is, of course, a highly experimental process. Working with a living material that responds to temperature, light, moisture and sterility levels means that, for Gerrard, ‘the aesthetic outcome was ultimately something I had little control over, allowing the materials to speak for themselves.’ The work’s colour derives in part from its materials, but has also been informed by the conditions in which the mycelium was grown and the sculpture was cured.
A big thank you to Georgie for her contribution to this episode as well as Loughborough University for the footage.
Location: maps.lboro.ac.uk/?l=edward-he...
Find out more about our arts collection:
www.lboro.ac.uk/arts/arts-col...

[@Shakespearept]

Such a cool process. Love this piece :)