Microbial and Material Intelligences

2019–2021

This body of work formed during a period when my nervous system no longer filtered the world in stable ways. Sensation arrived without hierarchy. Sound, threat, touch, temperature, memory, chemical shift, fatigue and signal arrived at once. What had once moved quietly in the background moved to the foreground.

My earliest encounters with material intelligence began in The Density of Sense, through domestic detritus, light, water, surfaces and unstable image processes. Materials were never passive in that work. They already behaved. They resisted clarity. They degraded, misfired, collapsed and re-formed. In Microbial and Material Intelligences, this understanding moved into living matter itself.

Around the same time, I began working with plant matter, minerals, waters and living inks. At first this began as a pragmatic and intuitive act. I needed materials that could hold instability, that could change, ferment, react and misbehave. Over time it became clear that these materials were not substances so much as communities.

These works emerged during the early waves of COVID. Social belonging fractured sharply. Public life reorganised around fear, control, infection and denial. My own human community narrowed and became unstable. At the same time, microbial life became impossible to ignore. The body was no longer imagined as contained or autonomous. It was revealed as a moving consortium.

Through reading in microbiology, horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis and distributed intelligence, alongside daily embodied sensing, I began to understand my own autonomic instability through microbial logic. Intelligence appeared not as command but as negotiation. Memory appeared without storyline. Decision-making appeared without a centre.

At the same time, material intelligence deepened. Pigments carried residue. Charcoal held the memory of fire. Waters held the chemistry of place. Road dust, salts, ash, plant fibres and decayed matter arrived already speaking of where they had been and what had passed through them. Materials acted as witnesses as much as tools.

I worked with living inks made from plant matter, mineral salts, waters and microbial growth. These inks were not carriers of imagery. They behaved. They migrated, bloomed, collapsed, stalled, contaminated one another. Mulberry papers became fields where bacterial, fungal, mineral and bodily chemistries left their traces together. The images remained active long after they were made. They continued to grow, break down and change.

At this time I began to understand the body as a negotiated territory rather than a sovereign whole. Humans contain more microbial life than human cells. The idea of a single self became materially untenable. What I had previously experienced as nervous system failure began to register as distributed sensing without a central filter.

This reframed autonomy, agency and vulnerability. Belonging no longer appeared benign. Exchange included support and exposure, regulation and invasion, shelter and overwhelm. Balance was never guaranteed. These conditions were not metaphors. They were lived.

Microbial and material intelligences also began to fold time differently. Bacteria carry deep evolutionary memory. Charcoal carries forests across eras. Minerals carry the pressure of ancient seas. Matter appeared not as inert present tense, but as layered ancestry. This is where my later thinking around material ancestors and necromanced carboniferous forests quietly took root.

The works from this period do not illustrate science. They operate through the same conditions they describe. They hold unfiltered exchange, continuous signal bleed, cooperative and competitive forces acting at once. They hold belonging as a state that is sustaining and risky in equal measure.

This is where the logic of later symbiotic and holobiont work begins, before it had a name.