MICELIO
Cultivating Creative Biodiversity
MICELIO
Cultivating Creative Biodiversity
An artistic and cultural initiative of Ediblescapes
Micelio is a developing artistic and cultural practice exploring creativity through relationships between people, living systems, materials, knowledge, culture and place.
Inspired by mycelium — the largely unseen networks through which fungi participate in living ecosystems — Micelio approaches creativity in a similar way: as something that can emerge through relationships rather than from a single discipline or individual.
A gardener, artist, craftsperson, scientist, child or cultural knowledge-holder may each perceive something different.
Plants, fungi, animals, materials, weather and time also participate in determining what becomes possible.
Micelio creates conditions for these different ways of making, knowing and living to encounter one another.
Cultivating Creative Biodiversity
Just as biological diversity strengthens living ecosystems, Micelio asks what creative biodiversity might make possible.
Creativity is not understood here as belonging only to professional artists.
It can be cultivated through observing, growing, making, remembering, experimenting, caring and responding.
Micelio cultivates creative biodiversity by creating conditions in which people, cultures, materials and other living beings can participate in making.
A Practice Growing from a Living Garden
Micelio has grown from nearly a decade of creative experimentation within Ediblescapes.
The relationship between art and garden was present before the community garden was formally established.
2017 — An artwork that became a garden
The future Ediblescapes garden began as a Geoglyph Earth Art project.
Mulch drew a large-scale artwork across the landscape while trees and plants grew in repurposed denim containers positioned within the design.
The artwork was temporary.
The relationships it initiated were not.
Plants established into the ground, people continued caring for the site, and over subsequent years the artwork became a living edible forest garden.
2019–2020 — Observing life making form
While experimenting with biofermentations for the developing garden, another creative observation emerged.
Microbial communities produced unexpected networks, membranes, colonies and landscapes across the surfaces of the cultures.
These forms were not drawn or sculpted.
Conditions were created in which living organisms could produce them.
This introduced a question that continues within Micelio today: what happens when the artist does not determine the final form, but cultivates conditions from which form can emerge?
2022–2023 — Making living relationships perceptible
Later experiments with digital modelling and augmented reality explored ways of interpreting relationships within living soil that are difficult to perceive directly.
Digital technologies became another means of looking — not a replacement for the garden, but a way of asking how invisible biological relationships might become perceptible.
2026 — Cultivating a Living Place as Art
These experiments now lead Micelio towards a new question:
What happens when we stop thinking about making an artistic object for a living place, and begin cultivating the living place itself as art?
The artwork is no longer necessarily something completed and subsequently installed.
It may grow.
It may be pruned.
It may produce food.
Branches may be selected, propagated, bent, woven and layered.
Roots may find new ground.
Materials may weather and eventually surrender some of their functions to living growth.
People return, observe and intervene again.
**The artwork is not completed and then maintained.
It continues to be made through care.**
The Artist–Gardener–Agroforester
Cultivating a living place requires continuing human participation.
Trees and perennial plants produce new pulses of growth. The artist–gardener observes these responses and works with them through pruning, propagation, layering, weaving, guiding and harvesting.
The process becomes cyclical:
Observe → Imagine → Guide → Prune → Propagate → Weave → Cultivate → Harvest → Observe Again
The gardener does not completely determine the resulting form.
Neither does the plant.
The work emerges through their continuing relationship.
This means that care is not maintenance performed after the artistic process.
Care is a creative act.
Growing Structures
Micelio is beginning to explore how trees and plants might gradually participate in forming places for human encounter.
The investigation learns from growth behaviours already present within forests and gardens.
Strangler figs and other Ficus species produce aerial roots that can eventually become substantial supports.
Mulberries and some fruit trees respond to pruning by producing vigorous young rods that can be propagated, trained, layered and woven.
Vines can travel rapidly through structures, producing food and seasonal shade.
Large-leaf edible plants can create living overhead surfaces.
Rather than reproducing the appearance of these biological forms synthetically, Micelio asks:
Can their growth behaviours themselves become artistic material?
Digital Making Meets Living Growth
CAD modelling and digital fabrication provide a human geometry from which the biological process can begin.
Micelio is exploring modular CNC-cut plywood structures containing ribs, openings, channels and growing nodes.
They could initially:
support and guide young branches;
provide places for propagation and layering;
guide aerial roots towards soil;
support edible vines and large-leaf plants; and
provide access for the artist–gardener to safely cultivate growth at different heights.
But the plywood is not intended to imitate a tree.
It is an instrument for cultivation.
As trees grow, branches thicken, roots establish and vines occupy space, the relationship between designed structure and living structure continually changes.
Some elements may remain.
Others may be replaced.
Others may eventually no longer be necessary.
Human geometry begins the conversation. Living growth continues it.
Cultivating the Canopy
An earlier Micelio exploration imagined a fabricated translucent canopy inspired by a giant leaf.
The living garden suggested another possibility:
Rather than manufacture the leaf, cultivate it.
Choko, passionfruit, yams and other edible vines can rapidly colonise an overhead framework.
Large-leaf food plants can contribute living surfaces of shade.
Below them, trees continue being trained and pruned so that light can penetrate where the edible forest garden needs it.
The intention is therefore not to place a garden around an architectural object.
The garden remains the place.
The Place Is Already Growing
The preferred place for this experiment already exists within Ediblescapes.
It is the gathering area still commonly known as the Banana Circle.
Trees growing around this space were planted as pioneers of an earlier idea we called the Living Cathedral.
We now see those trees differently.
Rather than constructing a new pavilion beside the garden, Micelio proposes to begin by observing what is already alive.
Existing trees, branches, paths, sunlight, garden layers and patterns of human gathering become the starting conditions for creative development.
CAD therefore does not begin with an empty site.
The design begins by listening to a place already growing.
The Banana Circle remains a place for people to meet, talk, learn, taste food, drink tea and spend time within the garden.
The forest garden continues underneath and around it.
What changes is that its future form is intentionally cultivated.
Food, Shade and Encounter
This is not conceived as a restaurant or a conventional building accommodating large numbers of people.
It remains an intimate garden gathering place.
Food-producing plants may simultaneously become part of its spatial formation.
Mulberries can provide fruit and structural growth.
Passionfruit, choko and yams can provide food and canopy.
Other fruit trees continue producing within the surrounding forest garden.
Shade, food, habitat, structure and artistic expression are therefore not separate functions.
They grow together.
Time Is a Creative Material
The work operates across different biological times.
Months — vines colonise structures and create shade.
Years — branches are trained, propagated and layered while young trees thicken.
Decades — trunks, roots and interconnected growth may increasingly define the space.
The work cannot therefore be understood through a single opening day or finished photograph.
Each season becomes another state of the work.
**Time is not what happens to the artwork.
Time is one of its materials.**
If the Place Changes
Ediblescapes is where we hope this exploration can germinate.
Its trees, community history and existing gathering place cannot simply be reproduced somewhere else.
But the creative investigation itself can continue.
If long-term cultivation at Ediblescapes is not possible, Micelio can begin experimental work within an existing small-scale syntropic agroforestry environment as a Living Laboratory.
There, modules, plants and cultivation methods can develop through successive growing seasons.
Through future Open Garden encounters, the experiment could be shared with artists, gardeners, educators and organisations interested in providing another place where the practice could take root.
The intention would not be to reproduce an identical object.
Micelio propagates practices and relationships, not identical structures.
Each place should grow differently.
Cultivating a Living Place as Art
Micelio brings together artistic practice, gardening, agroforestry, digital fabrication, cultural knowledge and long-term care.
It does not seek to make nature imitate a predetermined artwork.
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Nor does it imagine that living systems should simply be left to determine everything themselves.
It explores the creative territory between these positions:
human intention and biological agency,
design and emergence,
cultivation and spontaneity,
food and art,
making and caring.
And perhaps, over many years, a place emerges that no person — and no tree — could have made alone.
Cultivating a Living Place as Art
The artwork is not completed and then maintained.
It continues to be made through care.
Micelio
Cultivating Creative Biodiversity