The bright, crisp days of this drought-stricken autumn are hiding something. Under the crackling dry leaves, beneath the yellow grass and dusty ground, a magical constellation of mycelium is waiting and ready to revel in the wet.
Mushrooms are the very definition of humble, yet Rachel Portesi renders them with the full drama they are due in “The Nature of Things,” on view at the McCarthy Art Gallery at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester through October 31.
In her artist talk on September 18, Portesi, 54, who is primarily a photographer in Saxtons River, recounted how her project started during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’d stopped working with my models while we all hunkered down and the world grew quiet,” she said.
Like many of us, she started going on walks. On one occasion, Portesi recalled, she held a small cluster of oyster mushrooms her husband had found, looking at them in a way she hadn’t before. “When we got home, instead of bringing them into the kitchen, I brought them right into my studio, and I began photographing them.”
Portesi shoots with a large-format camera, using the 19th-century tintype photographic process to create a unique positive image directly on a plate inside it — think Civil War images or Victorian studio portraits. She then scans the tintypes so she can print them on a large scale. The images aren’t clean. Quirks of exposure and emulsion create a rich textural layer of streaks, thumbprints, dust spots and other variations. Portesi values that lack of control over the final image, she said.
The clear connection between process and themes contributes to the strength of her work. Having slowed down to photograph plants and fungi during the pandemic, Portesi said, “I spent hours and days looking at flowers and mushrooms. And as the mushrooms wilted and the flowers wilted, drooped, discolored and decayed, I found beauty in them at every step of the way — it kind of encouraged me to try to find beauty in myself as I age, as well.”
Indeed, the images read as portraits. In “Lion’s Mane,” Portesi blurs some parts of the strange fungus’ hairy surface as others come into crisp view; shadows and highlights give it depth and mystery. Likewise, several pictures of oyster mushrooms spotlight their deep gills and let the rest drop away into darkness.
Scale and printing technique are vital to the experience of these works. They are big — really big, for mushrooms — with several prints enlarged to 40 by 50 inches. Their tactility is palpable, with every wrinkle, dent, structure and smooth surface unignorable, each mushroom bigger than a human face and comparable in presence.
Portesi printed the photographs at Prints on Paper Studio in Cabot, whose expertise in calibrating an extremely dense, dark tonality comes through. In a series of morel mushrooms pictured on a black ground, the physicality of the ink is reminiscent of rich soil. That aspect of the images, as well as the scale, must be seen in person. Looking at each piece, one establishes a true connection with a physical object that can’t be reproduced — more like the experience of a painting than of a photograph.
The idea of connection — to nature, to other people, to the universe — is deeply important to Portesi’s concept of the work, which aims to convey the spiritual aspect of her encounter with the woods. Walking in the forest gave her a sense of unity with nature, she said — and she realized that underground mycelial networks mirrored what she felt aboveground.
Portesi began to research spiritual traditions and philosophy, such as Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things from the first century BC, in which he conceptualized the atom. She found the Roman philosopher’s ideas — primarily that nothing vanishes in death, but all particles recombine into something else — embodied by mushrooms and their role in cycles of decay and growth.
In the show, Portesi brings those ideas forward a couple of millennia with works in video and installation. With “Life Cycle,” she has filled one corner of the gallery with tree stumps sprouting tiny video screens, many of them removed from old phones or other devices and wired together. Real clusters of mushrooms emerge from the stumps; virtual ones grow in time-lapse on the screens.
The work suggests that the internet mirrors mycelium networks — which transport food and energy from the roots of one plant to another — while also finding a paradox in that connection. “While it promises unprecedented access to information and community,” Portesi said of the internet, “it can also foster isolation, alienation and fragmentation.”
Many viewers will relate the work to psychedelic mushrooms, particularly given the inclusion of “Breathing Lion’s Mane” and “Dancing Lion’s Mane,” a short video and video diptych made from digitized tintypes using AI. The lion’s mane mushroom inhales and exhales convincingly; in the diptych, its furry surface undulates in a flowing loop like some kind of Muppet stuck in a dance groove.
Both videos are trippy and, Portesi acknowledged, inspired by past experiences with psilocybin. She is fascinated by recent research into the substance as a mental health treatment, indicating it can provoke feelings, she said, of “unity with all things; transcendence of time and space; deep peace, awe, or sacredness; loss of fear; or even death.” However, she noted, “these are all things that I can access in the forest without the use of psychoactive substances — and I have to say, it’s a little more deeply meaningful.”
The centerpiece of the exhibition is sculptural: mosses, sticks and clusters of mushrooms presented in a human-scale wicker “burial tray” in which, Portesi said, she will one day be interred. She has placed a mirror at its head and included a tiny tintype of mushrooms in a Victorian-style handheld frame. The piece is Portesi’s version of a memento mori — a reminder of our own mortality, intended to provoke self-reflection and the acceptance of death as a necessary part of life.
It’s an old theme, but one with continuing relevance, perhaps especially following the pandemic. On her walks in the woods, “I had these moments where I felt so connected to everything and so comfortable, even with my mortality,” Portesi said. “I felt safe enough to see myself more clearly.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Fruiting Bodies | Rachel Portesi explores connection and mortality through mushrooms at Saint Mike’s”
This article appears in Oct 8-14 2025.
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