Fungi ─ Nicolai Howalt
An artist’s book exploring fungi, photography and co-creation through a series of poetic and materially driven experiments.
Fungi is an artist’s book by Danish visual artist Nicolai Howalt. Standing at the intersection of artistic experimentation and scientific inquiry, the project turns its attention to a realm that is barely perceptible to the naked eye, yet as essential to life on Earth as sunlight and oxygen. Incorporating multiple species of fungi directly into his artistic and photographic processes, Howalt creates a structure in which these enigmatic organisms actively shape the visual and material outcome of the work itself.
Inside light-sealed boxes, Howalt cultivates selected fungal spores directly onto sheets of unexposed analogue photographic paper. Feeding on the gelatin layer of the paper’s surface, the fungi gradually erode parts of the photosensitive emulsion, though their traces remain invisible until the sheets are developed in the darkroom. The resulting images form a series of photograms generated by the fungi themselves, in which delicate mycelial networks emerge through the paper’s slow deterioration as organic and unpredictable compositions. In a parallel process, spores are cultivated in petri dishes and scanned at high resolution, revealing vivid microscopic worlds filled with forms and colours that ordinarily remain unseen. Howalt also grows fungi into thin, paper-like layers that are left to dry naturally over the course of several months; once dried, these fragile translucent sheets are used in the darkroom as unique fungal negatives.
Each image appears as the result of a quiet negotiation between human intention and non-human agency: a barely retained imprint suspended between growth and decay, presence and disappearance. At a moment when fungi are increasingly recognised as vital to ecological balance, medicine and the future of sustainable innovation, this publication brings together Howalt’s experimental body of work in a form that is at once tactile, visual and reflective. Designed by the award-winning Rasmus Koch Studio and accompanied by texts by writer Morten Søndergaard and mycologist Henning Knudsen, Fungi is neither a scientific catalogue nor a botanical survey, but a poetic meditation on fungi and their role in shaping life and matter. Moving across the boundaries of science and art, it opens onto questions of ecological coexistence, time, photographic phenomenology and the unpredictable aesthetics of living organisms.
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Title: Fungi
Artist: Nicolai Howalt
Publisher: Fabrikbooks, 2025
Book Design: Rasmus Koch Studio
Text: Henning Knudsen, Associate Professor Emeritus of Mycology, Natural History Museum of Denmark; Morten Søndergaard
Print: Narayana Press
Format: Linen hardcover, rounded corners, coloured edges, leporello
Size: 165 × 225 mm
Pages: 160
Plates: 84 + leporello with 5 plates
Language: English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 978-87-974253-0-5