“Enmeshed” At Installation Space Inspired By An Unseen Species

Katy Rodden Walker’s “Enmeshed,” now on exhibit at Installation Space in North Adams, invites you in to a species-to-species interaction with giant microscopic forms of mycelium hung from the ceiling and walls. Walker has created an environment that puts you in a world of wonder, as if you’re in a forest of organic growth. With light effects and sound added, it becomes a sensory experience, but there is a message behind the sprawling web of cheesecloth and gauze.

Walker, an interdisciplinary artist, received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She focused on ceramics, but during graduate school she began playing around with gauze. At the same time, she was finding inspiration in Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and other writing that illuminate the cooperation between trees and other living organisms. What, she wondered, might we learn from our nonhuman counterparts about interconnectedness and sharing?

Cheesecloth provided a way to materialize those ideas. Ripping and tearing, ripping and tearing — up to 300 or so yards of cheesecloth, she reckons — and then dipping the fabric into a glue solution resulted in an astonishingly lifelike representation of microscopic images of mycelium writ large. Walker molded the torn cheesecloth over handmade armatures to create the orbs, and built the installation modularly so that it can be arranged to fit the space of the host gallery.

“I love creating environments, and I’m hoping people will have a visceral reaction to the installation,” Walker says. Like the real thing in nature, these forms are nonhierarchical, evolving and merging. “You can’t tell where they begin and end,” she says. And, she adds, the entire installation is sustainable; in time, the cheesecloth loses its shape, but is easily reconstructed with a reapplication of clay slip and glue.

Walker has set up the space with pathways through the web, allowing visitors to have their own experience. At certain points, the giant organisms become illuminated. The aural senses are also engaged by the recordings Walker has made that combine wind from the forests around her home in Wayland, Massachusetts, and the rain in North Adams that fell as she was installing the work. Her goal, she says, is to illuminate what is largely unseen. In "Enmeshed," she gives us pause to consider the life forces we can’t see without benefit of a microscope, and to look to them for solutions to between humans and the environment.

This is the third installation for "Enmeshed," but the first in the western part of the state. “Installation Space has been on my radar since the first time I was at MASS MoCA,” Walker says. The day after the well-attended opening reception, Walker was thrilled by the response to her work.

"Enmeshed" will be on view through June 25.