Everyday Holobionts

Field Notes: Everyday Holobionts

Mount Egerton, Wadawurrung Country 2024–ongoing

This body of work commenced in my first few months of living on Wadawurrung Country at Mount Egerton. The lichens surrounding my home are prolific. They coat trees, rocks, ground, and structures. They fall when peppermint or manna gums moult bark, or when strong winds fell branches and sticks.

Lichens do not have filters to choose what they can receive, and neither do I. My sensory overwhelm and lichens lack of filtration mean we form a living record of what has moved through us here, layered through changing conditions in a shared ecosystem.

After years of working with microbial and material intelligence, and with mistletoe as a guide into symbiotic life, lichens offered a daily, durational exchange. They are small communities of fungus, algae, and bacteria living together, holding histories of light, pollution, drought, rainfall, and air movement. As bioindicators, they carry the conditions of a site within their bodies.

All of the lichen I work with is windfall. I do not remove lichen from living substrates. Lichens grow slowly, often only a millimetre a year, and removing them from intact environments causes long-term harm. Here, windfall is abundant and fallen branches and sticks are gathered for fire prevention. Once lichens have fallen from their microclimates, they are on their way to decomposition. The abundance of desiccated lichen and my unwillingness to add it to our fireplace means I have the opportunity to work with it. In turn I run an experiment in regeneration, wetting spores and fragments and placing them back onto the bark of trees that already host the same species. But I will not know for many years whether anything holds.

Lichens meet my body through chamber lye, a traditional alkaline dye base made from urine, used historically in ancient lichen dyeing practices. This method carries its own constraints. It depends on time, patience, ambient conditions, and materials that change as they will. Dye making here is a matter of waiting, tending, and allowing reactions to unfold without certainty of outcome.

Urine becomes a daily indicator of my internal weather; mineral presences, fatigue, hydration, medication, heat, and stress. Lichen is also a litmus, and a bioindicator, a measure of pollution, air quality and environmental conditions. Colour, hue, scent, tone, viscosity, absence and presence, hold weather, seasons, body chemistry, moods, cultural shifts, microbial life, and plant structure all at once.

The exchange unfolds across paper and fabric, through ink and dye, in sheets, strips, calendars, and strata. The distinction between drawing and dyeing is porous. Bodies meet in a multi-layered record of time. In the paper works, each square holds a day of body and place data written into or alongside the lichen colour. Environmental conditions move the pigments’ behaviour. Some days are dense, others barely register. The work becomes a temporal terrain of bodies and place.

Through this work, I feel I’ve started to register a kind of co-terrain and co-temporality: a shared conductive field where body, lichen, bacteria, weather, soil, mineral, memory, and built structures move through one another. Within this space, time does not move evenly. Body rhythms, lichen growth, ferment cycles, weather shifts, and geological inheritance do not align. Sometimes they brush against one another. Sometimes they diverge. Sometimes one delays another. Time remains layered and uneven, carrying pressure from multiple scales at once.

Broken River language

These works arise from personal cultural disruptions and an attempt to re-pair ways of being with a place that I have no familial understanding of, after leaving a place that I had lived in for generations. They are eddies in my broken stream. Working alongside lichens has become a way of learning how to stay with the world, its unfiltered complexity, its intimacy and brutality.

Everyday holobiont life is breathing, digesting, sweating, fermenting, weathering, resting, failing, and adapting. It is mutual dependence without guarantee. Lichens and body chemistry meet as equals here. Neither controls the outcome. Both carry what has passed through them. This is not a technique. It is a way of keeping company with this place and with the many lives that move through me and around me each day.