exhibitions
Hay Castle Gallery will be filled with a forest of fungi, as well as fun and family-friendly immersive installations created by interactive digital arts duo, Genetic Moo.
Visitors can watch their movements transform into mycelia, while a live stream shows fungi taking over the town of Hay.
The Mesh
Composition and decomposition, creation and destruction: these are the fundamental processes at the heart of The Mesh. This interactive artwork allows you to experience what it is like to dissolve into, and emerge from, a living structure. Inspired by the behaviour of fungi, The Mesh grows in response to your movements, echoing the way fungal hyphae branch out in multiple directions, testing different pathways until one connects to a source of nourishment. That branch strengthens while weaker ones decline, a simple strategy that enables fungi to solve complex networking problems in nature and sustain their growth.
When you encounter The Mesh, the boundary between artwork and body dissolves. Your gestures become food for the structure: move slowly and you fuse into its rhythm, hold still and it grows around you, as though you are feeding it with stillness itself. In this way, the piece places you briefly inside the perceptual world of another organism, inviting empathy with nonhuman life. The experience is both generative and ephemeral. When you leave the interactive zone, the forms you shaped with your presence decay, breaking down in a soft act of digital decomposition. Your trace disappears, yet the memory of participation lingers. Interactive art is uniquely positioned to enable this exploration of otherness.
Genetic Moo is a collaboration between creative coding couple Nicola Schauerman and Tim Pickup. They have been making interactive art since 2008 starting with a single starfish and these days filling museums up and down the country with large scale projections. For Hay Castle Fungi Town they have adapted two pieces using branching, trail following algorithms inspired by living processes in nature.
Smithy grows other-worldly sculptures from mushrooms which he has combined with his exceptional bonsai collection to create a unique and breathtaking exhibition which will feature in the castle's gallery.
Smithy lives in Hay and has been growing reishi for many years, a practice that involves huge experimentation, patience, attention to detail and an artistic eye. His sculptures are an astonishing testament to the diversity, playfulness and beautiful weirdness of the fungal kingdom.
Harry Botley is a photographer who aims to create a bridge between art and the biological sciences. His work has helped to document research in Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest, namely into the biodiversity of bioluminescent fungi and ophiocordyceps.
His photos will be displayed on the 2nd floor alongside the Fungal Emporium.
