Mushrooms have become impossible to keep in their lane.
They were already food, poison, medicine, sacrament, decomposer, internet mascot and recurring guest star in the human imagination. Now they are increasingly material for contemporary art — not merely painted as cute caps in a forest, but used to think about networks, bodies, decay, communication and the uncomfortable possibility that the world is less individual than we prefer to imagine.
A new exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter makes that shift unusually visible. Living Labyrinths: Art and Fungi, running from October 3, 2026 through February 21, 2027, brings together scientific collections and contemporary art across ceramics, glass, photography, painting and textiles.
The subject is not “mushrooms are pretty.” The subject is relationship.
Mycelium ruined the metaphor for everyone
Once you learn that the mushroom above ground is only the visible fruiting body of a much larger fungal organism, it becomes difficult not to abuse the metaphor.
Writers do it. Designers do it. Tech companies absolutely do it. Everything becomes a network. Everything is interconnected. Somewhere a presentation deck grows a white branching diagram and calls itself mycelial.
But fungi remain compelling precisely because the reality is stranger than the metaphor. Fungal systems occupy borders that humans like to keep tidy: organism and environment, death and fertility, individual and network, visible and hidden.
That is unusually fertile territory for artists.
Living Labyrinths includes interpretations of mycorrhizal networks, historical fungal specimens and natural-history drawings. Two new commissions grew directly from museum collections: a large-scale drawing of the human mycobiome by Gemma Anderson-Tempini and bio-sonic sound art of mycelial networks by Jason Singh.
The fungus is no longer just being represented. Its relationships become material for the work.
Beatrix Potter was here before the mushroom merch
The exhibition also includes fungi watercolors by Beatrix Potter — yes, that Beatrix Potter — alongside Cy Twombly’s 1974 collage series Natural History, Part I, Mushrooms and work by eight contemporary artists.
That range matters.
The current mushroom boom can look very new because its visual language is everywhere: apparel, posters, tattoos, packaging, festival graphics, animation, wellness branding. But artists and illustrators have been staring at fungi for a very long time. The reasons change. Scientific observation becomes symbolism. Symbolism becomes counterculture. Counterculture gets printed on a tote bag. Then a museum places the tote bag’s distant visual ancestors beside contemporary bio-art and the loop becomes delightfully difficult to untangle.
Mushrooms are excellent at this. They make categories rot at the edges.
The psychedelic mushroom is only one mushroom story
For a psychedelic-art site, there is an obvious temptation to treat every fungus as a prelude to psilocybin. That would be lazy.
Fungi have a visual and cultural life much larger than psychedelics. They carry associations with decomposition, rebirth, folklore, poison, fairy rings, hidden systems, medicine, soil and transformation. Psilocybin mushrooms add altered perception and countercultural history to that already crowded symbolic bag.
The result is why mushroom imagery works so well in art even when nobody is depicting a trip.
A cap and stem can be a botanical object. A portal. A joke. A warning. A tiny umbrella over an invisible kingdom. Context does the heavy lifting.
That is also why the most interesting mushroom art usually does more than repeat a red cap with white spots and apply neon until surrender.
Fungi fit the psychedelic imagination because they challenge scale
Psychedelic art often plays with the instability of scale: microscopic becomes cosmic; skin becomes landscape; a pattern repeats until it seems to have its own laws.
Fungi naturally invite the same move.
Look at a mycelial network and it resembles roots, neurons, rivers, lightning, veins, maps. None of those comparisons makes the fungus any of those things. But visual resemblance lets the mind jump levels of organization. Suddenly a forest floor looks anatomical. The body looks ecological. A network becomes a landscape.
That jump is close to the heart of psychedelic visual language: not merely bright color, but the sense that one thing might be secretly rhyming with another.
The museum is telling us something else, too
When institutions build exhibitions around fungi, they are documenting a broader cultural shift. Mushrooms are no longer confined to botanical illustration, food culture or psychedelic subculture. They have become a serious design and art vocabulary.
That creates opportunity and risk.
The opportunity is richer work: artists can engage ecology, material science, indigenous knowledge, medicine, folklore and altered states without collapsing them into one aesthetic soup.
The risk is exactly that soup.
“Mushroom” can become a decorative shortcut for nature, mysticism and psychedelic identity all at once. When a symbol means everything, it eventually means very little.
The better work asks a more specific question: what is the fungus doing here?
Is it decay? Communication? Transformation? Humor? Network? Body? Portal? Evidence?
That question is much more interesting than whether the cap glows.
For more of PsychonautDream’s own mushroom visual territory, browse the Magic Mushroom Clothing collection or meet the artist behind the site, Raul Lopez Pomares.